Mark Carney is riding the anti-Trump wave

The new Canadian prime minister has something his Liberal predecessors didn’t: good luck.

Photo by Christopher Katsarov Luna/Bloomberg via Getty Images

One of the best books I’ve read on failure in politics is Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes. It is a searingly honest account of how the author became the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and, confronted by the low cunning of Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, led it to its worst ever defeat at the 2011 general election. Ignatieff was a journalist, broadcaster, biographer (of Isaiah Berlin) and academic before he became a politician after approaches were made to him by Liberal grandees (his father was a former senior diplomat). He had spent most of his career outside Canada – in London, where he was a presenter of ideas and arts programmes on the BBC, and Boston, where he taught at Harvard. He was cerebral and cosmopolitan. He had a sense of his own destiny as what Aristotle called a “great-souled man”. But he failed at politics. He was temperamentally ill-suited to the daily grind and relentlessness of the campaign trail. His skin was too thin to endure the “venomous personal abuse” he received and ceaseless public meetings wearied him. What did Tony Blair and Bill Clinton know that he did not, Ignatieff asked, adding that “there are no techniques in politics”. The successful Conservative attack line against him was that he was “Just Visiting”. In other words, he was a dilettante rather than a seriously committed career politician. He was merely passing through.

Could the same be said of Mark Carney, another cool, cerebral technocrat to whom the Liberals turned in desperation? Carney, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and a former governor of the Bank of England, is the personification of Davos Man. And yet, so far, he seems to have something that Ignatieff did not: good luck. Luck and timing are as important as technique in politics. Before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and boasted about absorbing the vast sovereign nation into the United States, the Liberals were trailing Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by more than 20 per cent in the polls. Poilievre seemed to be riding the wave of the new anti-establishment conservatism all the way to Sussex Drive. He is a brash, anti-woke populist who wants to dismantle the bureaucratic state. His positioning is straight from the Maga playbook. But Carney, edging ahead in the polls as the campaign begins, has another significant advantage over Ignatieff: he is an expert in global finance as Canada becomes embroiled in a trade war with its bullying former ally. Canada is turning against Trumpism.

In an age of autocracy, one is grateful for the rule of law in Western democracies. Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right National Rally and nominally favourite to win the 2027 presidential election, has been disqualified from standing for election for five years after a French court found her guilty of embezzlement and misappropriating European Union funds to finance her party. After the verdict, which Le Pen has said she will appeal, Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, posted his support for her on X: “Je suis Marine!” Her conviction will be used by the nationalist internationalist alliance as evidence of a liberal conspiracy against the insurgent right. But liberals should avoid triumphalism. The only way ultimately to defeat the politics represented by Le Pen and her fellow travellers is not in the courts but at the ballot box.

Justin Welby has given what he said will be his final interview reflecting on the events that led to his resignation after more than a decade as Archbishop of Canterbury. The interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, in which Welby said he forgave John Smyth, a barrister and serial abuser of children and young men, for his heinous crimes, was painful to observe. Wearing a dark jacket and open-necked pale blue shirt, Welby was contrite as he discussed his failure to respond adequately to the allegations against Smyth (who had a long association with the Church of England), which he was first made aware of in 2013.

I asked Stephen Cherry, Dean of Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, who has written two notable books on forgiveness, why Welby should feel compelled to forgive Smyth. “There is huge pressure on Christian people to think that to forgive is always right,” Cherry said. “Christianity understands God through the lens of the father in the story of the prodigal son. The wayward son becomes desperate and returns home only to find his father is immediately and fully forgiving. Christians have used this model of God’s forgiveness as the basis of an ethic of interpersonal forgiveness. And while it’s a great paradigm when the harms are low-level between equals, it’s very different when the vulnerable are traumatised by those who have abused their power.” Cherry thinks Welby should have been more restrained about forgiveness. “I wish he had avoided falling into the trap of either/or and immediately said: ‘It’s not my place’ and stressed without equivocation that the primary question of forgiveness of John Smyth lies with those he most severely harmed. By saying that he would forgive, he reinforced the view that forgiveness is always best. It isn’t. Survivors of abuse need to hear that.” That is surely right. The Makin Report concluded that “responses by the Church of England and others were wholly ineffective and amounted to a cover-up”. Justin Welby accepted the conclusions of the report and, after anguished equivocation, resigned. He now seeks anonymity. Meanwhile, the suffering of the victims is perpetual.

This column appears in the 4-10 April 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine