Warren Kinsella fancies himself a bon vivant, a punk rocker and the so-called “Prince of Darkness” of Canadian politics. His political books are thick with tales of dirty tricks and nasty business in Ottawa’s corridors of power, and he is an admitted and most gleeful practitioner of both. His reputation and methods have brought him to the helm of Michael Ignatieff’s “war room,” where he will presumably ply his trade in the Liberal leader’s next election campaign.

Kinsella’s return to the Liberal fold–he went into quasi-exile from the Liberal Party during Prime Minister Paul Martin’s regime, and has an ongoing defamation lawsuit against Martin–has riled the Conservative government enough that party MPs have invoked Kinsella’s name 36 times in the House of Commons in an apparent attempt to discredit Ignatieff. “Kinsella’s thuggish antics have been approved and condoned by the Liberal Party,” said Conservative MP Lois Brown in one typical screed. The attention has at once delighted and inflamed Kinsella, who catalogued the outbursts on his blog. “[T]hey do all that they know how to do: attack, vilify, smear,” he wrote earlier this month. Coming from Kinsella, who once wrote that “negative politics work,” this might well be a compliment. “The political folks I work with know who I am and what I do,” Kinsella wrote in an email to Maclean’s. Apparently so; publicly, Liberals responded with a collective shrug–for the party, Kinsella’s campaign muscle is seemingly worth the dust he kicks up. “Warren’s a great guy, I love him,” said senior Ignatieff advisor Alfred Apps. Continue…