KING OF CANADA

Stereotypically, Canada seems perhaps the dullest land on Earth, with a political life of stable, centrist consensus. Yet this reputation may not be entirely deserved, as shown by the story of Canada’s three-time Prime Minister, William Lyon MacKenzie King (1874-1950), the country’s rough equivalent to Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee combined, who held office for a total of 21 years between 1921 and 1948. King led his country through WWII with such a steady hand that Canada came out better off than before the conflict began, with GDP doubling, while contributing more troops to the D-Day invasion than anyone besides the US and Britain.

It would be churlish to deny Mr King was a great man… but he was also an incredibly tedious one. Hardly Churchillian in manner, he was even more self-effacing than Attlee. In a 1946 survey, only eight per cent of Canadians said they admired their leader, in spite of his obvious service to them and their freedom. Far more exciting was King’s Scots-Canadian grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), Toronto’s first mayor, who in 1837 led an armed uprising against colonial rule before serving as President of a short-lived rebel enclave, the ‘Republic of Canada’ in 1837-38. Considering it his sacred duty to finish what his ancestor had started, it was King who negotiated Canada’s decoupling from Britain, ultimately winning it the status of an autonomous nation. Rather than being ruled by the King, Canada was now ruled by King instead, and his triumphs were legion; he set up Canada’s first sovereign Foreign Office and the Bank of Canada, as well as Canada’s welfare state.

The war over, in 1946 King passed the Canadian Citizenship Act, which for the first time legally defined inhabitants as full-blown Canadians, not mere British subjects. On 3 January 1947, he received Canadian Citizenship Number 0001, thus making him literally first among equals. His only flaw was his dullness. But then, following his death in 1950 aged 75, it was revealed that, from his student days in 1893, King had been meticulously keeping a candid diary, some 30,000 pages in length – and, when its contents were revealed, it turned out he