WILLIAM Shakespeare, a perceptive student of human nature, wrote four centuries ago that life is a predictable passion play driven by human weakness, vanity, folly and ambition.
“All the world’s a stage,” he said.
From his time to ours, it always has been true that some real-life political actors have more difficulty abandoning the limelight of the stage than do others.
The political season of 1998 offers examples.
In British Columbia, once-disgraced Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm has resurfaced as defacto leader of the provincial Reform party.
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In Calgary, former Reform MP Jim Silyea is musing that he just might be the leader the federal Progressive Conservative party needs.
And then there is Joe Clark, former Tory leader and temporary prime minister who hears the party and the nation calling once again.
Clark’s case is different, of course. His 21 years as an Alberta MP were blemished by bad judgment, weak leadership and party disloyalty, but never by scandal.
When he announced last week he once again wants to lead the Tory party, now a fifth place parliamentary rump with a $10 million debt and no obvious short-term revival prospects, Clark entered the race buoyed by name recognition and a vague national sense of guilt about how he has been treated.
He also dragged along a sack full of history and a record of bad decisions which will haunt him during the campaign.
He will claim maturity has distanced him from past misjudgment. Or is he just an older version of the man who squandered a chance to govern?
He will brag about being a consensus politician who can bring people together. Critics will remember that he could not hold his own party together.
He will say he has a national vision. Critics may see it as decentralizing appeasement and an attempt to package the old wine of Meech Lake and Charlottetown in new bottles.
The challenge facing Clark and rivals Hugh Segal of Toronto and Brian Pallister of Portage la Prairie, Man., is formidable.
All will have to convince party members they can unite a party divided between conservative philosophies and a parliamentary caucus largely elected in a backlash against the conservatism of the Liberal government.
And they will have to convince Canadians there is a PC niche between Reform’s populist conservatism and Liberal marketplace conservatism.
Clark has the burden of a self-imposed obligation to be re-elected in Alberta.
If Brian Pallister knows his local political history, he might even offer the party a lesson from the past.
The last time the Tories dipped into their history to try to defeat an entrenched Liberal government was in the early 1940s when former Portage MP and prime minister Arthur Meighen was brought back as leader.
The resurrected white Tory knight ran in a Toronto byelection against unknown CCF candidate Joe Noseworthy and lost.
The Liberals stayed in power for another political generation.
