Please Advise! Is It Backstab-the-Leader Time Already?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

When is it appropriate to bring out the knives for a political leader?

Signed,

Chef

Dear Chef,

Thank you for your important question. This is a point of political etiquette that is being badly flouted in 2020.

Take BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson. He is still the head of a major provincial party with at least a hypothetical chance to form government, and the election isn’t until Saturday. Common courtesy suggests you shouldn’t start with the stabbing until Sunday at the earliest.

But are Liberal party bigwigs showing a decent amount of discretion? Are they waiting until the proper moment before pulling out the stainless-steel carving implements? Hardly. In a tweet Thursday Liberal membership chair Nicole Paul said “We have a problem in the leadership of the party and their lack of willingness to stand up for diversity, inclusion and the values of BC Liberal members — not just the interests of a small group of constituents.”

Etiquette requires you to know proper settings. The fork, not the spoon, goes on the left. After the salad course, but before the election, the knife does not go into the leader’s back. But kids today. They just don’t get it.

For Paul, the flash point was Laurie Throness, the Chilliwack-Kent Liberal MLA who recently compared free contraception to “eugenics.” (For those unfamiliar with the term, it does not refer to a remarkable line of herbal supplements guaranteed to improve skin tone and digestion, but to any attempt to control populations through selective breeding, schemes often intended to eliminate designated “undesirable” groups from society.) Throness, whose opposition to contraception is much more plausibly explained by his deeply conservative religious beliefs, then resigned as Liberal candidate and is now standing as an independent. Another victim of Big Eugenics.

It’s not surprising that the most recent season of Games of Throness has been a disappointment, but then the previous episodes were not great either — Throness has long established himself as no friend of the LGBTQ+ community. Which was what motivated Paul’s criticism of Wilkinson. “I am pleased to see Laurie Throness will no longer be a candidate or caucus member,” she wrote, “this is action that any reasonable leader would have acted on months, if not years, ago.”

Pretty darn stabby, particularly in the middle of a campaign. Shrewd political observers like Dr. Steve consider this a telling indicator that things may not be going according to plan. If dumpsters were equipped with fire alarms, the BC Liberals’ rolling metal bin would be fully ablaze and shrieking.

Party members are expected to stab laterally. To his credit Wilkinson has been doing that, aiming a dagger at BC Conservative Leader Trevor Bolin for his handling of a 2018 sexual harassment complaint at one of his restaurants, and hurling stilettos at John Horgan over his handling of the Nathan Cullen controversy.

Now that’s stabbing according to the Marquess of Queensberry rules. But it can’t be easy when you’re busy dodging blades thrown from your own corner.

Something similar seems to be happening south of the border. As the Nov. 3 election approaches, Commander-in-Chief Trump is seeing poll numbers that Golfer-in-Chief Trump could only dream of. Finally, oh so belatedly, a few Republicans are starting to inch away. Texas Sen. John Cornyn is among those Republicans now trying to reposition themselves as principled members of the Resistance. Cornyn recently insisted he has disagreed with Trump on many issues but has done so privately.

After all, any loudmouth publicity-seeker can disagree publicly. But it takes real courage to whisper your disagreement into a paper bag and then hide that paper bag in a storage locker rented under a phony name, until such time as the polls instruct you to air your courage before the nation.

But in Trump’s case, anybody trying to get a knife into his back has plenty of competition from the president himself. Watching Trump is like seeing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar performed as a one-man show. Nobody stabs Trump better than Trump. He is the best. For example, Trump recently said of his opponent Joe Biden, “He wants to listen to Dr. Fauci.”

Biden appears to be anti-death! Some of the greatest Americans who ever lived are dead. If death is good enough for FDR, damn it, it ought to be good enough for you. Trump 2020!

The only thing keeping Republicans onside is the almost mystical belief that 2016 will repeat itself and Trump will pull out an improbable win. His deranged QAnon followers still have faith.

It is just Andrew Wilkinson’s bad luck that no one in B.C. seems to ascribe to him the omnipotent powers required to combat a global pedophile ring. It’s handy to have that kind of support. Perhaps if in the waning days of the campaign Wilkinson can somehow tie Dr. Bonnie Henry to George Soros, he may have an outside shot. Otherwise this Halloween a whole lot of BC Liberals will be dressing up as Edward Scissorhands.