Rob Ford: the crack-smoking mayor of mayhem who could out-Trump Trump

Irish Independent

11 hours ago

So Rob Ford could definitely have been Irish – or perhaps Australian. Instead, he was Canadian. Canadian! Ford was the type of politician who is usually described as a colourful character, a description that can cover anything from an unconventional love of red socks to an addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine. With Ford it was the latter. Your average Canadian politician he was not.
And the electorate loved him. He had been a councillor in Toronto since 2000; one mild-mannered local politician remembered that no one wanted to sit beside Ford during council meetings because 'he was so aggressive'.
Actually, he was an arch conservative with a far from traditional lifestyle and an obsessive interest in clientelist politics. Ford would fix it for you.
This is Mayor of Mayhem, the second episode of the new documentary series on Netflix, Trainwreck.
Ford was not pleased at losing some of his powers. 'It reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait. You guys have just attacked Kuwait'
The story is pretty much a one-man show. In 2010, Ford ran for mayor of Toronto, the biggest city in Canada. The experts and commentators said he didn't have a prayer. He romped home. Soon he was tearing up cycle lanes (nobody is all bad) and long before Donald Trump, he was attacking the media. He was making sure that council transport employees were re-classified as emergency workers, so that they were forbidden from striking. He shouted a lot. He had already been dismissed as the coach of the football team at Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, a post in which he had been active for more than a decade. Sometimes he was coaching when he should have been at council meetings. You know yourself. But a controversial TV interview put an end to the beloved coaching.
And then he was videoed smoking crack cocaine, in the company of gun runners.
This is all old news in Canada, presumably. But it is strangely informative for the rest of us.
First of all there are the spooky parallels with Irish political style. Then there is the strange spectacle of someone out-Trumping Trump, before Trump had even got started. Although Ford looks more like a baby than Donald Trump. Ford was round – very round – and various shades of pink.
Mayor of Mayhem is also an object lesson in addiction and denial, which is sad. Ford denied to his closest friends and staffers that he had a drug and drink problem. Whilst drunk, he'd put his campaign manager in a headlock, and subsequently fired him when the man persisted in suggesting that Ford might want to go somewhere to detox.
His behaviour became more and more volatile – rows and fights and a memorable rendition of Jamaican patois, performed solo in a takeaway. His speech became even wilder. We cannot provide you with the most shocking example of Ford talking to the press, because it is too obscene. But it is fair to say that Canadian journalists are still recovering.
Those Canadian journalists come across here as the morality police, which will make some of us uncomfortable. Of course, I'd happily accept the offer of a video showing a politician smoking crack cocaine but it's a scary world when it is journalists – of all people – who are telling other people how to behave, and dancing on the high ground.
Anyway, the video of Ford smoking crack took a while to surface, and when it eventually emerged, a poll of Toronto voters found that half of them thought the media had fabricated the recording. Meanwhile, the journalist who reported what she had seen when she'd viewed the video started getting death threats. And all of this before Trump, before Covid.
This is really the story of someone falling apart in public. There is little exploration of Ford's relationship with his father, Doug Senior, who was a self-made millionaire and also an elected councillor. Yes, politics was a family affair for the Fords. Rob's first ambition had been to be a football player, but that didn't work out.
His fellow councillors could not remove him from the post of mayor. But they started to remove his mayoral powers from him. Ford was not pleased, and reacted with his customary restraint. 'It reminds me of when Saddam attacked Kuwait. You guys have just attacked Kuwait,' he said.
When he was diagnosed with cancer his brother, Doug, ran for mayor instead of him. Rob, after all the shenanigans and a spell in rehab, actually got re-elected to Toronto's city council. People still loved him. But he died in March 2016, aged 45. Donald Trump was elected for the first time the following November.
This film shows a small political circus spinning out of control. It's mesmerising, and I don't want to spoil the spectacle, or the thrill of our disapproval, but it would have been better if it had concentrated a little less on its roaring leading man, and a little more on the pain that made Rob Ford the way he was.
'Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem' is available on Netflix from 8am on June 17