The book is based on hours of taped interviews, amounting to more than 7400 pages of transcripts, with Mulroney himself, family, friends, colleagues and contemporaries.
In the interviews, he proclaimed himself the greatest prime minister since John A. Macdonald, and claimed that Pierre Trudeau opposed the Meech Lake Accord to try to destroy him.
Mulroney describes his successor Kim Campbell as a "very vain person who blew the 1993 election because she was too busy screwing around with her Russian boyfriend" (Gregory Lekhtman), resulting in "the most incompetent campaign I've seen in my life."
According to Newman, Mulroney wanted someone to write a definitive history of his time as Prime Minister, warts and all.
Newman writes that he didn't get one, and that the only pre-condition was that any book (based on the interviews) be published after Mulroney left office, which happened in early 1993.
Charest noted that Mulroney was the father of Free Trade and argues that the GST was a good thing for the Canadian economy.
The original tapes are now located in a special collections archive at the University of Toronto, where Newman says they will remain safe for future historians.
This program was produced and directed by Mike Sheerin, who had previously been nominated for a Gemini Award for making the Life and Times of Peter C.
[5] The suit had three main demands: Prior to this, on November 17, 2005, Mulroney's friend, scandal-ridden former media lord Conrad Black, filed a libel suit against Newman for "falsely and maliciously accusing him of breaking criminal laws, including mail and wire fraud and money laundering in his 2004 book about Black."