Brian Mulroney thinks he was a great prime minister, resents those who crossed him and wants to blame his party’s devastating 1993 electoral defeat on Kim Campbell. This is news?

It apparently shocked The Globe and Mail, which last week filled the top half of its front page with these “revelations” from Mulroney himself, contained in a new book by Peter C. Newman.

Now, if Mulroney’s comments had revealed him to be lacking in ego, admiring of his critics and willing to shoulder the blame for the destruction of the once-mighty Progressive Conservative party, that would have been news.

I doubt Canadians are all that surprised — or offended — by the bluntness and vulgarity of the “unmasked” Mulroney.

Canadians disliked Mulroney for many things, including his policies, particularly the GST.

But the intense, visceral dislike many feel for him has more to do with his ingratiating manner, with the way he seemed to toady up to the powerful.

While he dealt roughly with some people, he appeared fawning and obliging around U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Hence the nagging suspicion among Canadians — reinforced by the recent softwood lumber decision — that the United States got the better of us in the free-trade deal Mulroney signed with Reagan.

I think Mulroney actually unmasked himself years ago in a childhood anecdote that he related in fond detail to biographer L. Ian MacDonald.

As a young boy growing up in Baie Comeau, Quebec, Mulroney was selected to sing for Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary U.S. press baron who’d created Baie Comeau as part of his pulp and paper empire.

The seven-year-old Mulroney, son of an electrician, was wide-eyed with delight as he got up on top of the piano in the grand company house where McCormick stayed during his Baie Comeau visits.

At the colonel’s prompting, our future prime minister sang Dearie and a few other ditties (When Irish Eyes are Smiling, perhaps?).

Apparently taken with this pleasing performance, the colonel handed the boy the immense sum of $50 U.S.

After that, Brian was summoned to sing whenever the colonel came to town.

Mulroney relishes the story. One of his former law partners, Frank Common, told me he’d heard Mulroney recount it “about a thousand times.”

It was apparently a pivotal lesson. Mulroney realized he could rise above the dreary little world of a pulp-and-paper town and taste the big, exciting world of money and power that lay beyond.

All he had to do was please the colonel, sing him a little song.

Pleasing the powerful turned out to be something Mulroney excelled at.

He was certainly good at pleasing the business elite, which contributed more than $52 million to his party’s coffers in appreciation for his tax and trade policies.

Ordinary Canadians seem to dislike Mulroney however — not because they’re offended by his coarse language, but because they sense that, deep down, he never stopped singing for the colonel.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...