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The Senate scandal has already done us one favour: It’s put an end to the say-what-you-want-but-Stephen-Harper-is-a-brilliant-tactician meme.

Imagine for a moment that you are Nigel Wright this week. Much more than Mike Duffy, you are the man who knows where all the bodies are buried.

When the story of the $90,000 cheque blew, the prime minister initially stood behind you; it was a private transaction between friends, after all. Then, less than a week later, you resigned. But Conservatives, including spokespeople for the PM, fell all over themselves saying what a darned shame it was (as Kady O’Malley reminded us the other day with this Storify.)

No hard feelings, then?

But now, as the Senate scandal builds, the prime minister remembers it all differently. You didn’t resign. You were “dismissed”. You were the one at the heart of the deception, Harper announced in the House of Commons.

You — Nigel Wright, who reluctantly took a sabbatical from a fabulously lucrative Bay Street career not out of ambition or lust for power but from a sense of public service and partisan loyalty, who compromised that career and your reputation for Stephen Harper, and whose very liberty may be in peril — have now been cut loose.

Nixon treated Haldeman and Erlichman way more gently than that.

Time to lawyer up, Mr. Wright. Time to consider precisely when and in what forum you will share what you know — maybe even before the next election 18 long months away. The prime minister no longer believes he owes you anything, and I guess that frees you from any obligation to him.

Speaking of which, what the dickens did Stephen Harper expect would happen once his Senate minions threatened to cut off Mike Duffy’s salary and benefits?

Duffy’s gift of the blab is legendary. I have no idea where Bob Fife got the $90,000 cheque story back in May, but if I had to guess whether it leaked from Wright’s camp or from Duffy’s … well, why don’t you have a guess yourself?

Harper’s pattern is to demand absolute unquestioning loyalty — sometimes to the level of self-abasement — from those around him. But it is not a reciprocal thing.

Time to lawyer up, Mr. Wright. Time to consider precisely when and in what forum you will share what you know — maybe even before the next election 18 long months away. The prime minister no longer believes he owes you anything, and I guess that frees you from any obligation to him.

Peter Kent discovered this when he was dropped from cabinet a few months ago, after loyally toeing the Harper line on climate change. He’s now exploring his newfound life as a vertebrate, even questioning the wisdom of the prime minister’s latest Senate moves. He is one among many Conservatives who are enjoying the experience of autonomy for the first time, as the party gets set to meet in convention.

In his just-released book on Harper, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Paul Wells portrays Harper not as the relentless ideologue he is sometimes viewed as by the Left — and not as the power-hungry opportunist he is sometimes viewed as by those among the disappointed Right.

In Wells’ view, rather, Harper is a strategic incrementalist who believes that the longer he is in office, the more he gets to do to advance his Conservative agenda — and the less able his successors will be to undo it.

I think this is essentially right. A firmly-anchored strategy allows Harper an almost Leninist tactical freedom. Whatever brings you to office, whatever keeps you in office, serves the deeper cause.

The idea that you have complete tactical freedom because your strategic goals are so supremely important must convey a supreme sense of liberation from routine moral, ideological, esthetic, and perhaps even legal constraints.

If you need to offer a dying man life insurance to knock off a government, as there’s evidence Harper and his sidekicks did with Chuck Cadman in 2005, then you do what you have to do.

If you need to smear a Liberal as a friend of the Taliban, or ruin a public servant’s career … well, you have to break eggs to make omelets.

If you need to reverse a policy suddenly because the political wind had shifted, then you do it, even if it means a little grinding of gears.

But being tactically unconstrained, as Harper seems to feel he is, does not always mean being tactically smart.

He was clever to get out of the 2008 coalition crisis by proroguing Parliament — but he only got himself into it by being tactically too clever by half, trying to knock the opposition parties to their knees by cutting off their public funding.

He was clever, perhaps, to appoint Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau among 18 new senators when the rest of us were off partying a few days before Christmas in 2008, defying a promise never to make patronage appointments to the Senate. But, but, but …

I’ve been in Winnipeg this week visiting family and friends. Often on these visits, I am struck by how completely different the conversation in Ottawa is from what folks are discussing back home. Not now. People are talking about the Senate as much as they are about the Jets’ slow start — something confirmed in that startling new EKOS poll.

The trouble with a low-key strategy and high-key tactics is that, at some point, people start noticing the tactics. They may even start voting on them.

Paul Wells quotes Harper as saying that his practice is to scrutinize his own mistakes to make sure he doesn’t repeat them.

But that isn’t really true. His tactical pattern is one of thuggishness that pays no tribute to loyalty and no obeisance to literal truth. And people are starting to notice.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.