OTTAWA—The Liberal party is dead and the “natural governing party” title now belongs to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, author Peter C. Newman has proclaimed in his new book.

“If you had the chance to relaunch the Liberal party today, would you? The answer has to be a resounding ‘No!’ because there no longer seems to be a need for one,” Newman writes in a book that was originally conceived as a chronicle of former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s path to power.

“Liberals have finally met their Armageddon. Get used to it.”

Newman, 82, is a veteran journalist and author who specializes in writing about the powerful in Canada. He has apparently decided that the federal Liberal party has lost its clout, its purpose and its future.

His new book, When the Gods Changed, charts the decline — largely as it occurred in the past few years under Ignatieff’s leadership. Ignatieff resigned in May, immediately after the party was reduced to 34 seats in the federal election.

Ignatieff’s rise and fall is documented through interviews with the man himself, with Liberals on the inside and outside of his circle, and even a couple of psychoanalysts who portray the former leader as motivated by “guilt” and a need for “redemption.”

Much of the narrative will be familiar to Canadian politics-watchers, though there are a few small revelations. They include:

• Ignatieff, though he was deputy leader of the Liberal party, was totally kept out of discussions on the potential coalition government with the NDP in late 2008 — and the exclusion coloured his attitude toward the idea. “I was the last member of my caucus to sign the coalition agreement and I did it as an act of party loyalty,” Ignatieff is quoted as telling Newman. “On the morning that he (then-leader Stéphane Dion) signed it, and he did not do me the courtesy as his deputy leader, I’m being very blunt, of informing me the coalition discussions were under way. I learned of it in the press. And I thought that’s a hell of a way to bind a party together.”

• Ignatieff briefly considered throwing his leadership support to Bob Rae, his old university friend and now interim Liberal leader, at the 2006 convention that elected Dion. Ignatieff, who ended up coming in second on the final ballot, reportedly knew he would lose to Dion and huddled with advisers on whether to help Rae win the contest.

• The Liberal leader lost the confidence of much of his caucus, Newman says, when he surprised them in September 2009 with an ultimately “disastrous” election dare for Harper. The damage was further escalated that fall with the firing of his chief of staff, Ian Davey, who speaks publicly for the first time in Newman’s book about his abrupt dismissal. “By chopping off the head of a simple, loyal guy from Toronto, Michael had undone his organization — it just made me want to cry,” Davey is quoted as saying.

The book also asserts that Ignatieff fared badly in the election debates because he dumped the advice of someone who had been useful to Dion in the 2008 election: an adviser named “Rex Murphy.” But this appears to be a typographical error and not any sneak peek into the CBC commentators’ involvement in Liberal backrooms. Tim Murphy, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Paul Martin, was a player behind the scenes in Dion’s debate preparation in 2008 but did not do the same for Ignatieff.

Newman is most recently remembered as the author who incurred the wrath of former prime minister Brian Mulroney for publishing interview tapes that had been collected for a biography project that never saw the light of day. Ignatieff, now a professor at the University of Toronto, has not commented publicly on how he views his interviews being used in a book that declares the Liberal party dead.

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