…and why is he speaking so eloquently on my radio these days? Turns out he’s a former policy chief for the Liberals, perhaps shoved aside during the Martin years but making up for it now. It’s so rare to hear someone speaking of politics with not only elegance (a rich, quite British tone and vocabulary and actual sentences) but idealism and principle. His watchwords appear to be “practical idealism”. He’s death on rule by polls, and on Paul Martin’s institution of “regicide” as a matter of Liberal operating fact. Yikes. I’m sure he’s too intellectual, too soft-spoken (and, likely, too brown) to be Prime Minister, but a look at his website suggests that he is certainly ambitious and very capable. Perhaps by the time he can speak to the Tim Horton’s Every(Wo)man – if he ever acquires that knack and loses that Oxbridge lilt – his ethnicity will no longer be a barrier. (Or perhaps he’s in line to be our Henry Kissinger.) He’s a political animal, but I am still impressed.