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“The besieged professor only truly understood how to connect with a crowd at the very end of his time in Ottawa, and could never undo the impression that he was an academic trout out of water, unsuited to wooing the general public.”

“The voters sensed that he wasn’t one of them — call it the Tim Horton syndrome. He clearly belonged not in the doughnut shop, chowing down with the rest of us, but in his own cloister.”

Newman, whose research included interviews with Ignatieff and other key Liberals, also concludes that the party’s refusal to renew itself also played a significant role in the drubbing, in which Ignatieff lost his seat and the Grits were reduced to just 34 seats in the May 2 election.

“To place the burden of the blame on Michael Ignatieff is neither fair nor accurate. He was there, acting as a catalyst on the road to ruin. But the catastrophe in party fortunes was less his doing than his inheritance.”

Newman writes that Ignatieff’s brief reign as Liberal leader “was compelling in its Wagnerian symmetry.”

“His genuine dedication to the party’s rebirth was offset by its state of disrepair, and the self-satisfied hibernation of its previous leaders. His failure was more a symptom of their careless stewardship than his doing — but try as he might, he could not halt the party’s disintegration.”

In one chapter, Newman writes in detail about the “best interview” he had with Ignatieff — on the leader’s cross-country bus trip in the summer of 2010, just months before the election campaign.