Category: save draft

Who could have imagined the new Pierre Poilievre? Not me. One day he’s a geeky, bespectacled nonentity, and the next day he’s sleek, newly sartorial, with a swirled head of hair and eyes that see and can be seen. Put it all together and I’d almost call him handsome. I cannot imagine the hours of staff meetings that went into this transformation. Well, as a former political staffer to another leader who had image problems, in fact, I can well imagine. A journalist was commissioned to write a magazine piece on my leader, Robert Stanfield, and we foolishly allowed said...

A few years ago, I spent most of a day with six men huddled over a bank of computers and green-glowing radar screens deep within Cheyenne Mountain, 500 meters below a rough-hewn granite peak near Colorado Springs, Colorado. At one point, a buzzer sounded, a bell rang, and a wall light flashed red. An unidentified blip had popped onto a screen in the missile warning centre, a 10m by 10m low-ceilinged room at North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad). The duty officer snatched a beige phone from its cradle and was instantly linked to Norad command post, another nearby room...