No Surrender: Reflections of a Happy Warrior in the Tory Crusade

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan and the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents and The Invisible Crown.

The jacket copy of this book describes its author as the ultimate
insider. There is irony in this claim, since one of the themes Segal
develops in No Surrender is that of Progressive Conservatives as
perpetual insiders, even when in power. In the eyes of others,
especially the public service, they are suspect because they do not
trust government; at the same time, because their own preference is for
stability over change, they are ill-equipped to take initiative. In
short, their values render them unfit to govern—almost. Segal says
that “Conservative parties in Canada are more comfortable at the
provincial level; and voters have traditionally been more comfortable
electing them at that level.”

This intriguing hypothesis is borne out by the personality sketches
that pepper nearly every page. No Surrender is nothing if not a
fascinating collection of political portraits—all featuring subjects,
except the diabolical Trudeau, who were of the Tory persuasion. Robert
Stanfield, Bill Davis, and Brian Mulroney are represented in lush, warm
Sargent-like tones, each the cynosure of his respective surroundings.
John Diefenbaker, Kim Campbell, and especially Joe Clark appear as
fragmented, disjointed characters dwarfed by circumstances. If metaphors
are dangerous, let Segal’s words speak for themselves. He uses each of
the following adjectives to describe one of the six individuals
mentioned in the preceding sentence: compassionate, honest, capricious,
glib, remote, solicitous. The review reader will probably have little
trouble correctly matching adjective to politician. The description of
Clark as the ultimate outsider—of his own political family—is as
brutal in effect as it is polite in the telling.

With such division’s as Segal describes here, this crusade will never
reach whatever destination passes for a Tory Jerusalem.