This is a black and white edition of THE REAL SCANDAL: A CONVENTION DIARY. THE REAL SCANDAL is a first-hand, minute-by-minute account of the leadership convention held by the Liberal Party of Canada in 1984 to replace Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Prime Minister at the time. John Turner won the leadership, in spite of signs of weakness. He later became the Prime Minister, but only after a struggle with Pierre Trudeau, and was routed by Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives in the general election. The results left many people unhappy. There was a general feeling, in many of the rival campaigns, that the results had been informally fixed by the power-brokers in the party, in a thousand different ways, who were not going to let the membership choose the leader that they wanted.THE REAL SCANDAL is based on a convention diary and is essentially a memoir. It is a book by a young man, with a background in law and an interest in literature, trying to figure out politics. The entries review the general leadership process, the political issues in the campaign, and its ongoing coverage in the media. They also take in many other contemporaneous events, which help to situate the convention in the larger historical context of the time.The book is written in the first person, in stream-of-consciousness, with the 1984 federal election looming ahead. It takes its title from one of the entries in the text, which asserts that the real scandal in politics is telling the truth. The point of view is implicitly insurrectional. The book sets aside the hypocrisies that keep the system in place and looks candidly at the realities of the leadership process. Its perspective is introspective, highly personal, and slightly surreal, moving in and out of philosophical reveries to the floor of the convention center, and back. There are many monologues and imagined incidents, which gives it a fictional sensibility.The author writes: "I learned that party politics, up close, was mostly fiction, and found myself thinking that I was watching a melodrama, scripted by the vague and shadowy figures in the backrooms of the party. There were moments of excitement and disappointment, and plenty of farce. It was evident that the party's organizers wanted something riveting on television." The diary explores the psychology of politics and the desire for power at the heart of it, along with a wide variety of literary and philosophical questions. The author writes: "Suppose you went looking for a metaphysics, and couldn't find one?"A REAL SCANDAL: A CONVENTION DIARY comes in two volumes. The first volume of the book contains a lengthy preface, which comments on the state of the country at the time, reviews the politics going into the convention and reflects on the career of Pierre Eliott Trudeau. The preface includes a philosophical investigation of the nature of democratic and party politics. It contains a brief history of politics, which recounts the origins of democracy and the party system. The style of the history is fabulous and comic. It tells the story of the way that the politicians stole the law. The preface also sets out a bifurcated theory of politics. This theory has its antecedents in Edmund Burke's Letter to Lord Bolingbroke, where Burke asserted that party politics is based firmly on an internal dynamic, which is hidden from the public.