Michael Ignatieff, whom David Herman recently profiled in Prospect, has suffered a number of reversals on the road to being Canada’s liberal leader. His glamorous media-don lifestyle in Britain and America led to accusations of carpetbagging, while his writing in support of the war on terror saw him accused of neocon sympathies. But a man whose appearances on Britain’s The Late Show in the 1990s sent hearts fluttering, whose Harvard lectures were packed with amorous admirers and who once appeared as a cover star in GQ magazine now faces a more surprising problem: losing the support of female voters.
A report in the Globe and Mail newspaper has revealed that Canada’s female voters are deserting the one-time sex symbol in droves. Focus groups cite women describing Ignatieff as “stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.” Still worse, Canadian author Patricia Pearson was also quoted as saying: “Did you see that political commercial of him standing in a meadow… It just made me laugh so hard. He looks like he has heartburn.”
A version of this item first appeared in the diary of Prospect's November issue
