John Crosbie began his political life as a Liberal in the cabinet of Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland’s first post-Confederation premier. After his 1968 resignation in disgust at Smallwood’s corruption, he switched parties and in 1976 entered federal politics, subsequently holding several cabinet portfolios. While the events covered in his 30-year career are familiar, Crosbie’s take on them in No Holds Barred is unique.

He ran against Brian Mulroney for leadership of the Conservatives in 1983 and attributes his loss to his lack of French. The book shows that Crosbie’s inability to learn French is part of a general linguistic ineptitude – a failure to grasp how words reflect attitudes and shape thoughts. As such, it is a valuable case study in discriminatory language.

His famous verbal gaffes and his excuses for them are revealing. When a storm erupted over his comment that admitting women to constitutional talks would open the door to “cripples and coloureds,” he blamed the press for seizing on the remark. If he’d intended it for the public, he said, he would have used sanitized language.

He berates journalists and yet takes up the slogan of political correctness so beloved by the bottom feeders among them. Yet he doesn’t seem to understand its meaning. When criticized for racist and sexist slurs, for meeting with South Africans of all kinds, for his (admirable) stance on refusing to stigmatize a gay politician, his knee-jerk reaction is the same, “I won’t bow to the forces of p.c.”

When he is not blaming p.c. and the media for his public relations debacles, he blames the humourless people who aren’t laughing their heads off at his sexist jokes. Actually, the book abounds in humour, although not the kind intended by its author. Crosbie constantly puts his foot in his mouth, then makes matters worse as he struggles to extricate it.

There’s irony too. Since by his own admission, he was a liability to his party, his cabinet positions were surely due in part to a desire for geographical inclusiveness. And that, I believe, might accurately be described as political correctness.