ANDREW COYNE: Anatomy of a Political Suicide: Lessons for the Right from Stephen Harper’s Canada. “The nastiness of Tory politics under Harper, the mindless partisanship, the throttling of backbench MPs, are not outgrowths of conservatism. They were born, rather, of its repudiation: of the decision to sterilize the new party of any ideological convictions, the better (it was supposed) to remove any obstacle to its electability. Politics fills a vacuum: in the absence of substantive differences with your opponents, partisanship takes its place. . . . There has been much talk of how Red Tories were made to feel unwelcome in the party. But the truth is no sort of conservative could really feel the Harper government represented them: not fiscal conservatives, $150 billion in debt later; not social conservatives, forbidden even to say the word ‘abortion’; certainly not old-time Reformers, the sort of people who went into politics to make governments and leaders more accountable, not less.”