In September, after Doug Ford made a promise on behalf of Rob Ford that Rob Ford had no intention of keeping, the mayor’s staff finally felt compelled to distance itself from the mayor’s older brother and best friend.

“Councillor Ford speaks for Ward 2,” Rob Ford’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, said in a statement, “and he’s Vice Chair of Budget Committee and Build Toronto among other official functions. He has insightful opinions on many issues but he does not speak for the Mayor or the Mayor’s Office. Mayor Ford speaks for himself.”

Five months later, after a committee decided not to prosecute Rob Ford over alleged campaign finance violations, he held a press conference in the mayor’s office. He delivered a statement, immediately left the room, and had someone else take questions from reporters on his behalf: his campaign manager, Councillor Ford.

It’s complicated.

Doug Ford has been the most vigorous defender of his brother’s words and behaviour, the most consistent advocate of his brother’s waning political agenda, and the fiercest counter-critic of his brother’s foes — an unquestionable asset, especially as the mayor withdrew from the media and other conservatives publicly and privately distanced themselves.

Doug Ford has also been responsible for some of his brother’s biggest failures.

His flippant dismissal of Margaret Atwood and casual endorsement of library closures galvanized opposition to the mayor’s cost-cutting plans. His self-professed “backroom vision” for a mega-mall and a giant Ferris wheel in the Port Lands led to the administration’s first major defeat. The brotherly weight-loss challenge he conceived — then won by a mile — caused the mayor stress and embarrassment.

Atwood derisively suggested that Doug Ford is a co-mayor. While that is an exaggeration, no councillor, including the deputy mayor, holds nearly so much informal power. Centrists have complained that Doug Ford has engaged in bare-knuckle vote-whipping efforts, threatening to either run a Ford-backed candidate against them or fund robocalls intended to undermine them if they refuse to support the administration’s agenda.

But councillors say he has also served as a bridge of sorts. A natural salesman who is social even with people he doesn’t like, he has done some of the relationship-building and give-and-take that is unnatural to his shy and uncompromising brother.

On occasion — in urging his mayor to attend a Pride event, in supporting a recent compromise on firefighter hiring — he has demonstrated a pragmatism critics say Rob Ford lacks.

“I’ve always believed that Doug actually makes Rob a smarter mayor,” said Councillor Adam Vaughan, a critic. “I think he brings the word ‘yes’ to that office . . . Doug has had the ability to get him to say yes to a few things.”

Some of the mayor’s aides have privately moaned about the additional headaches Doug Ford has created for them. Early in the term, an administration official asked one of their council loyalists to serve as an informal advisor to Doug Ford in an attempt to keep him on message.

“They usually try to muzzle me up,” Doug Ford said half-jokingly on the radio in November. He did not say who “they” were.

Rob Ford, known for his unfiltered manner, has sometimes himself sounded like a worried PR handler on the weekly radio show they co-host — responding to Doug Ford’s hyperbole with a nervous “wow” or groan, admonishing him with an irritated “you can’t say that,” snapping at a jibe about his weight-loss failings.

Their banter is jocular and competitive, and Doug Ford has raised eyebrows with one-upping cracks at the mayor’s expense. When Rob Ford has been asked about Doug Ford, though, he has usually responded with unabashed sentimentality.

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“Some brothers don’t get along,” he told Maclean’s in 2011. “We love each other past the point of love.”

With files from Paul Moloney

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