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Selley: What Doug told the Sun is just bizarre. He claims to have called up two superintendent friends at the Police, who assured him that it was related to “a bust they were making at the airport.” Can anyone just call up the cops and receive such assurances? In any event, he wasn’t having it. “You know when a plane is surveilling you,” said Doug. Really? What, from years of experience? He also claims the police have bugged the Ford family’s telephones, but hey, that’s no big deal. “Rob is fine,” he assures us.”He has rhinoceros skin.” It’s all just (Ford’s words) “some elitist people in Toronto” (Warmington’s words) “trying to obtain the reins of power,” he says. What? It’s as if he has just casually added a bloody police investigation to the list of piddling annoyances the Fords have to endure as they fight relentlessly for the taxpayer. Will he say the same if they’re arrested for God knows what? “The cops have always had it in for us Fords! We’re political prisoners!” Silence is a PR tool that has worked brilliantly for the Fords. Why Doug saw fit to address this flare-up, while ignoring so many others, is quite a mystery.

Goldsbie: Like Buster Keaton with the house falling down around him, the comedy comes less from the increasingly elaborate situations in which the Fords become entangled than from their ever-more-improbable methods of escape. Things that would and should spell disaster for any other living human become no more than set-ups for the city’s favourite gag: how will those crazy Fords manage to get out of this one? Rob typically dodges, evades, and lies, while Doug typically describes a deranged alternate reality in which he and his brother are perfect and the rest of the world is mad. They make a great double act, further leavened by interstitials of slapstick farce, such as Sandro Lisi’s zany efforts to escape the media at Old City Hall. And it will always get weirder. In response to the Star report that at the Leafs playoff game on May 8, “Ford and Lisi disappeared together into a small washroom in the director’s lounge, with no explanation given when they emerged,” Ford’s former executive assistant tweeted “Do you question when women go to the washroom together?” If Ford and Lisi were in fact absconding to a one-toilet washroom in order to examine each other’s makeup, I withdraw my snark.