“…we’d love to run against pretty much any of [the Liberal leadership candidates]. I can’ see Gerard Kennedy or Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae or Stephane Dion — all smart, decent people — selling with a forty-yeard-old plumber in Peterborough who makes forty grand. The spectrum o ffirst-tier leadership candidates there reads like the perfect list of attendees at a cocktail party in gthe Annex or Cabbagetown. It’s not Main Street. It’s not the kind of slate that can connect with a broad middle-class constituency.
We were joking this morning. What’s Ignatieff’s wife’s name again? [Ignatieff is married to Zsuzsanna] Exactly. So in the next election it’s Steve and Laureen vs. Count Michael and What’s-Her-Name. It’s almost a dream for us.”
– Jason Kenney, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, quoted in Right Side Up, by Paul Wells, p. 265
More on the Counts in the family:
http://www.damianpenny.com/comments/display/6112#115598
Just to round out the background, Michael Ignatieff's great-grandfather, Count Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatieff, appears in “Flashman at the Charge” and “Flashman in the Great Game” by George MacDonald Fraser.
http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/britishlibrary/controller/subjectidsearch?id=11259&&idx=1&startid=32590
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Ignatieff
http://www.amazon.com/gp/phrase/ref=cap_bod_6/102-8754869-5664167?ie=UTF8&src=0452263034&checkSum=geKNRgLh0K7PdngERrwYO9PvmLuZRiKUdSCTfMrUYhw%3D&phrase=Count%20Ignatieff
Note also this, about Michael Ignatieff's father George, regarding Count Nicholas:
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/ciw-cdm/caun/Ignatieff-en.asp
“As he relates with humour in his memoirs, The Making of a Peacemonger, his father was the Tsar's last education minister; and his father's father, an adventurous soldier and diplomat, who settled 'a border dispute with China in 1860 and then rode on horseback from Peking to St. Petersburg – a two-month journey-to bring first word of it to the Tsar, and to stop the British and French from undermining the treaty!”
Mark
Ottawa