Despite its partisan reek, this is a very good, at times terrific, memoir: engaging, insightful, and informative. Alas for the author’s shrinking band of red Tories, their historic Conservative party home is endangered. The ideological energy on the right in the 1990s has shifted to the neo-conservatism of the Reform Party, Mike Harris, and the likes of David Frum and Andrew Coyne. Segal offers up as an antidote a Tory cri de coeur including the illuminating and oft-forgotten distinction between Tories and neo-cons: the former treasure social order and cohesion as a necessary precondition for the latter’s fixation with freedom and acquisitiveness.

Segal was the ultimate political insider – a charter member of Ontario’s Big Blue Machine who went directly from university politics (and as a failed undergraduate candidate for parliament) to work for Robert Stanfield, Bill Davis, and Brian Mulroney. He sings – shouts – their praises and paints them devoid of blemishes. His Mulroney is a brilliant and lion-hearted statesman and manager unjustly maligned and vilified by the hyenas in the media. Energetic, articulate, entrepreneurial (and at 29, Ontario’s youngest-ever deputy minister), Segal was nevertheless an unlikely Tory: the grandson of a Russian Menshevik who voted CCF and the son of a fiercely Liberal sometime Montreal cabbie and failed businessman. At high school, John Diefenbaker converted him with his populist appeal for unhyphenated Canadianism. Segal’s anti-Liberalism became so pronounced and intense (he compares the pleasures of sex to politics), it carried him into Quebec’s Union Nationale as a teenager.

Segal’s characterizations are both acute and contestable. Diefenbaker in defeat comes across as a troublesome old fart. He has nothing good to say of Pierre Trudeau. Nor does he think much of Joe Clark or Kim Campbell during their brief prime ministerial reigns. In contrast, Bob Rae gets praise, albeit in passing.

Overall, Segal fulfills the role he established for himself in the media: an unapologetic partisan and Conservative spin-doctor, one who foolishly predicted 90 Conservative seats on the eve of their 1993 evisceration. It is testimony to Segal’s skills and decency that some senior Mulroney ministers encouraged his candidacy for the prime ministership. It is testimony to his perceptive judgment that he declined. Reading this book offers insight into why the Conservatives have been Canada’s natural opposition party.