Can it be true? Did the Conservatives refuse to let eminently qualified Newfoundland lawyer Ches Crosbie carry the party’s banner in the upcoming federal election because he had once gently mocked Stephen Harper?

Are they that petty? Is the prime minister that petty?

Certainly it is a believable story. Harper does run a one-man government. He is not known to welcome dissent. With a few exceptions, his cabinet ministers are notoriously supine.

Within the Harper government, top billing goes to those MPs best able to angrily parrot the party line. To listen to the rote answers of Conservative parliamentary secretaries is to weep.

In such a government, there may not have been much room for 61-year-old Crosbie.

Crosbie’s first sin is to be John Crosbie’s son. The elder Crosbie, a minister in the Progressive Conservative governments of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, was notorious for his independence of mind.

He also had a sharp-tongued sense of humour. Crosbie senior couldn’t resist a good line, even if it was politically incorrect.

His son, a former Rhodes scholar, appears to have inherited some of those genes.

The younger Crosbie’s second sin was to take part in a fundraising spoof for a local theatre company. The Harper Conservatives are wary of theatre types. They suspect them of liberal, or even socialist, tendencies.

But Ches Crosbie’s third and gravest sin was to use this spoof to make fun of Harper.

A parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the skit featured Crosbie as King MacHarper dueling with arch-enemy MacDuffy.

There were oblique references to Mike Duffy and the Senate scandal. Some remarks suggested MacHarper was self-serving.

As satire goes, it was tame. But perhaps not tame enough for the Harper Conservatives. John Crosbie says the MacHarper spoof sealed his son’s fate.

Ches Crosbie has said only that the party told him he “wasn’t the type of candidate they wanted.”

They must have not wanted him desperately. He was the only one contesting the Conservative nomination in Newfoundland’s Avalon riding.

All political parties reserve the right to vet potential candidates. In that sense, the Crosbie decision was not unique.

But if party big shots override a local riding association, they usually do so for standard political reasons.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, for instance, refused to let former candidate Christine Innes contest a Toronto nomination last year. She and the party offer different explanations. A lawsuit has been launched.

But no matter who is right, there were tensions within the Ontario wing of the Liberal party that help explain what happened.

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Similarly, Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats last year overrode a local riding association in British Columbia and refused to let Paul Manly contest a nomination there.

Manly had publicly supported his father, Jim, a former New Democrat MP who took part in a 2012 attempt to defy Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.

Paul Manly had also criticized the NDP for what he called its overcautious approach to the Middle East conflict.

Whether the Innes and Manly decisions were fair is up for debate. But at least they made rough political sense. The Liberals wanted to nip in the bud any internal party conflicts. The NDP didn’t want to alienate pro-Israeli voters

The Crosbie decision, however, does not make sense. Avalon went to the Conservatives in 2006. It could do so again.

The Liberals there are in some disarray. Current MP Scott Andrews was expelled from the Liberal caucus for “personal misconduct” last year and now sits as an Independent.

In a normal political party, a candidate with Ches Crosbie’s profile would do well.

But the Conservatives, it seems, are not a normal political party.

True, they don’t always act out of pique. Former provincial minister Kevin O’Brien is being allowed to run for the Conservatives in Newfoundland even though he once accused Harper of having “no integrity.”

But Ches Crosbie did much worse. He made fun of the boss. For parties built on the cult of personality, that is unforgivable.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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