Rogue Tory

Winner of the Dafoe Book PrizeWinner of the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography1995 marked the 100th anniversary of that most charismatic and enigmatic public figure, the thirteenth prime minister of Canada, John George Diefenbaker. Beloved and reviled with equal passion, he was a politician possessed of a flamboyant, self-fabulizing nature that is the essential ingredient of spellbinding biography.After several runs at political office, Diefenbaker finally reached the Commons in 1940; sixteen years later he was leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. In 1958, after a campaign that dazzled the voters, the Tories won the largest majority in the nation's history: the Liberal party was shattered, its leader, Lester Pearson, humiliated by an electorate that had chosen to "follow John."Diefenbaker's victory promised a long and sunny Conservative era. It was not to be: instead Dief gave the country a decade of...