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Jean Chretien puts Paul Martin in a (figurative) choke hold

Early reports of My Years as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien’s new memoir about his time in the top job, have it that he saves his best shots for his own successor.

According to The Globe and Mail:

Mr. Chrétien has little nice to say about his immediate successor at the Liberal helm, Paul Martin. He doesn’t even offer much praise for Mr. Martin’s performance as his finance minister, suggesting that it was he, as prime minister, who made all the really tough decisions while other ministers, particularly Marcel Masse in Treasury Board, did not get the credit they deserved for taming the national deficit.

Mr. Chrétien says he considered firing Mr. Martin and cancelling government contracts with his lobbyist friends in 2000, after the minister’s supporters met secretly at a Toronto airport hotel to stir the leadership pot. He was talked out of it by top advisers, Eddie Goldeberg and Jean Pelletier.

“Both were to regret their advice and I soon regretted my decision to keep him,” he writes.

Still, Mr. Chrétien says he’s thankful to Mr. Martin in one respect: the plotting to push him into early retirement so angered Mr. Chrétien’s wife, Aline, that she released him from an earlier pledge to serve only two terms as prime minister.

“To be very frank, now that Aline had removed the only impediment to my staying, I was damned if I was going to let myself by shoved out the door by a gang of self-serving goons.”

Goons!

To add insult to, well, insult, the article goes on to say that “Mr. Chrétien is surprisingly charitable about Mr. Mulroney.”

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