I feel as though I have finally had that beer I wanted to have with John Horgan. Maybe two or three.

It has taken a posthumous book—one long series of tales, trials and tribulations, told in his inimitable voice—for me to at last unhitch any vestige of the performative politician from the very admirable human soul that left us last November.

Horgan told his life story after leaving the premiership and into battling cancer, even from a Berlin hospital bed in his final days, to journalist and longtime friend, Rod Mickleburgh, a former bureau chief of The Globe and Mail.

Only a handful of passages interrupt Horgan to set the context of a chapter; the book reads like one long evening into the night and the early morning listening to him. John Horgan: In His Own Words, will be released in mid-October by Harbour Publishing, and no amount of quoting or excerpting it does full-on justice to what you can hear as you read.

I have spent about 45 years now writing, broadcasting and managing newsrooms on politics in Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver, and the late B.C. premier was the leader with the most intriguing path among all I watched. He was in no way born for the role, he made enough mistakes to rule out any run for office, he caught breaks more than made them, but by the time he left as the first two-term NDP premier, even former adversaries marvelled at the natural fit. In the interviews, Horgan noted the NDP banished—at least while he was there—"the narrative that the NDP can’t manage money.” He took special pride in showing that surpluses and social spending weren’t mutually exclusive. He reminded readers that........

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