‘Peter Newman, go f–k yourself’: The post-politics wit of Brian Mulroney

Brian Mulroney had a political afterlife of more than 30 years, during which he was a near-constant keynote speaker and media commentator. (One of his last public appearances, in fact, was a pro-Israel keynote delivered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in November.)

Even to foreign audiences who had no idea who he was, these talks were often described as jokey, lighthearted and “anecdote-heavy” – which is somewhat at odds with the far less whimsical version of the 18th prime minister that would dominate Canadian TV screens in the early 1990s.

Greeting old ladies while pantsless

It was while running for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1983 that the future prime minister greeted a group of old Tories without realizing he wasn’t wearing pants. As Mulroney told it in a 2013 interview with Macleans, he was being driven around to New Brunswick campaign stops in a camper van. Always a snappy dresser, Mulroney was removing his pants once inside the van in order to preserve their crease. Eventually, this led to the pantsless Mulroney unwittingly bounding out of the van to greet a throng of “elderly ladies.”

Haha, you’re old

Mulroney was only 53 when he resigned in 1993, and he’d subsequently see the next decade of Canadian politics dominated by Liberal prime ministers who were older than him. As such, throughout the 2000s a favourite joke of Mulroney’s was to muse about a return to politics under the slogan “give youth a chance.”

Meeting Mila

Mulroney was a 33-year-old lawyer paying a routine visit to the Mount Royal Tennis Club when he spotted a fetching 18-year-old in a bikini and vowed to make her his wife. Mulroney told the story of this first encounter constantly — often in front of large audiences that included the couple’s children. At the former prime minister’s star-studded 80th birthday party in Palm Beach, Fl., Mila would tell attendees “I’ve tried for 45 years to get him to change the narrative and tell people that we met at the library, but it always comes back to the bikini.”

‘Peter Newman, go f–k yourself’

“Peter Newman, go f–k yourself,” said Mulroney in a video address to the 2005 Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. Journalist Peter C. Newman had just published The Secret Mulroney Tapes, a tell-all book assembled from years of recorded interviews that Mulroney had reportedly believed were conducted on background. Mulroney would end up filing suit against Newman for the book, but not before delivering his candid take on the journalist to the assembled press corps. For added effect, Mulroney frontloaded the insult with an extended formal greeting to “your excellencies, Prime Minister, Justices of Supreme Court of Canada, distinguished members of the press gallery, madames and monsieurs.”

Comforting an ‘unpopular’ Ronald Reagan

Especially when he addressed Americans, Mulroney would often talk about being a trusted confidant of the two Republican U.S. presidents whose terms of office aligned with his own. He once told a U.S. audience about receiving a phone call from Ronald Reagan, who was complaining about his approval rating dropping to 59 per cent. “Ron I don’t know how to break this to you, but Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and I combined don’t have a 59 per cent approval rating,” Mulroney replied, citing the U.K. Prime Minister and the German Chancellor, respectively.

Canada: No U.S. invasions since 1812

When Mulroney won his smashing landslide victory in 1984, he took the reins of a Canada in which it was still a very real possibility that a Soviet nuclear strike could come over the North Pole. When he resigned, the Soviet Union had collapsed, Eastern Europe was free and pieces of the Berlin Wall had already been shipped off to museums. Mulroney may not have been a major player in that eventuality, but at a 1997 speech in California he described giving his pitch to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. was not out to destroy them. His reasoning? If the U.S. liked subjugating countries, they probably would have started with Canada. “If the Americans were imperialists, they would be after us,” Mulroney said he told the communist premier.

Bush and boos

The last years of Mulroney’s premiership were spent under a near-constant barrage of protests and heckling. One of the most notable came in 1990, when he was scheduled to throw out the first pitch at a Toronto Blue Jays game on the exact day that his caucus approved the GST. Mulroney also happened to be at the game alongside visiting U.S. President George H. W. Bush. When the prime minister’s appearance predictably spurred a torrent of boos from the stands, Mulroney would later recall telling the press, “I felt as ashamed as any other Canadian to see the visiting president of the United States treated in such a manner.”

Defeat and ignominy comes to us all

During CTV’s Election Night coverage in 2015, Mulroney was brought in to give his thoughts about the newly elected Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Most commentators that night had some dissertation about policy differentials or youth voter turnouts. But Mulroney instead gave his bemused and somewhat foreboding take that Trudeau might be the man of the hour now, but that his day would come. “I ran and was successful because I wasn’t Pierre Trudeau. Jean Chrétien ran and was successful because he wasn’t Brian Mulroney and Justin Trudeau tonight was successful because he wasn’t Stephen Harper,” he said.