OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made no secret of his distaste for the media, but he spends a large part of each day focused on “messaging” and communication, according to a new book containing rare, inside glimpses into the federal Conservative government.

Ottawa columnist Lawrence Martin’s newly released book, Harperland: The Politics of Control, features interviews with former Harper staffers who reveal the extent of the Prime Minister’s fixation with his Liberal enemies – who he sees everywhere – and his ongoing efforts to shape the way his government is portrayed in the media.

Those efforts included the Prime Minister leading daily “rehearsals” before Question Period with his full cabinet, with ministers obliged to practice their lines before the boss.

Former Conservative trade minister David Emerson, who also sat in the Liberal cabinet of prime minister Paul Martin, said this rehearsal session was a new phenomenon to him – one that he appreciated.

“You’d go through a dry run as to what was going to be said,” Emerson is quoted as saying in the book. “And the prime minister himself would intervene regularly to shape someone’s response to an issue. And the discipline was amazing.”

The book also paints the picture of a typical work day for Harper, which includes extensive briefings on what is being said about his government in the media and thorough performance reviews of ministers’ answers in Question Period.

“Although the prime minister maintained that he didn’t pay much attention to the media, staff didn’t believe it,” Martin writes in the book. “They could often tell by Harper’s responses that he’d read the article or seen the TV report they were discussing. In more informal moments with staffers, he sometimes gave his views on media pundits.”

Harper’s concerns with how his government was portrayed also stretched into the realm of book publishing too, with revelations that he tried to stop the publication of a book by his long-time friend and former chief of staff, Tom Flanagan. The 2007 book, Harper’s Team, was published despite those efforts, but it severed the connection between Harper and Flanagan, which was rooted in their days at the University of Calgary and the founding of the old Reform Party.

Flanagan, in Martin’s book, acknowledges that he has problems with the way Harper has “taken centralization to new levels.”

“The control stuff was often too much for me when I was there and I remain convinced that he overdoes it,” Flanagan is quoted as saying in Harperland.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Prime Minister’s Office has reportedly dismissed this new book as “biased,” but the author, Martin, is saying that the revelations come from Conservatives – friends of the government, not enemies.

Emerson, who has now left politics, is one of several people who described to Martin the depth of Harper’s antagonism toward Liberals – an antipathy that has coloured much of his actions in government. In Emerson’s words in the book, Harper is described as “viscerally hating” Liberals.

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Another former PMO adviser, Keith Beardsley, says: “He hates the Liberal Party and I would say his aim from day one – and I don’t think anyone would disagree – was to break the brand. The long-term strategy, that is.”

Beardsley says that the high degree of control in the Harper government was originally intended to be temporary – a means of avoiding mistakes while the ministers and members of the new Conservative regime were finding their feet after gaining power in 2006. But the six-month plan turned into a permanent state of affairs, he said. “I never saw it really let up,” Beardsley says.

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