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Loose cannon

“Over a significant time many Exchange board members became edgy about aspects of Mr Lawrence’s performance. There were many opportunities to gain the impression that at any moment the opportunity existed for an explosion to occur over one incident or another,” Mr Brydon told the Treasury Select Committee.

Giving evidence to the MPs moments later, John Kemp-Welch, the chairman of the Stock Exchange, rejected Mr Lawrence’s accusation that he could have saved him by supporting him. “I find it a doubtful proposition. When put to the vote, not one member of the board voted in favour of Mr Lawrence,” he said.

- Market-maker labels Lawrence ‘a loose cannon ready to explode’, Independent.co.uk, March 21, 1996.

2. It’s not exactly a man-bites-dog story when someone accuses Bill Clinton of stretching the truth, but when it's a president of his own party, and when what he calls Clinton is a “bald-faced” liar, and when that president happens to employ Clinton’s wife as the Secretary of State, well, yes, that’s kind of newsworthy.

That’s one of the juicier morsels in Renegade: The Making of a President, a new campaign book by Richard Wolffe, who covered the 2008 presidential race for Newsweek. Wolffe also quotes Barack Obama as referring during the campaign to former President Clinton as “a loose cannon.”

These quotations are sourced directly to Obama himself, and come out of interviews the author did with “the candidate,” as Wolffe calls him in a conscious emulation of Kennedy campaign biographer Theodore White. That Obama cooperated with Wolffe is obvious; in fact, it appears that the idea for the book may originally have been Obama’s. Revealingly, the tension in Wolffe’s narrative is elevated when he’s writing about the nomination fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton more than when he chronicles the runoff between Obama and John McCain. This is as it should be. Not only was the Obama-Clinton contest closer than the Obama-McCain duel, it was longer, more bitter, more interesting, and more historic...