It is high summer. Parliament is in recess and television is in reruns. For a watchful media, though, there is no holiday; autumn is far away, yet it is open season on Michael Ignatieff.

Actually, the media has been stalking Ignatieff for months. The hounds picked up the scent after he published his book, True Patriot Love, in April. Now they’re in full howl.

Of course, journalists need not apologize for examining critically the career of an ambitious native son who spent decades abroad as a writer, broadcaster and scholar. That’s good journalism.

And there has been much of that, particularly from the meticulous Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail, who has made the study of Ignatieff a science unto itself.

His colleague, Lawrence Martin, as well as John Geddes and Peter C. Newman of Maclean’s have also written incisively on Ignatieff.

None has given him a free ride.

And then there are others — a school of harpies and hand-wringers — who portray the man as an intellectual fraud, a jumped-up philosopher, a snob and a hypocrite.

Consider a recent article in Maclean’s called “Bogus Peacekeeping?” that reports Ignatieff was “once slightly more harsh toward his native land” than he is today.

According to the story, Professor Ignatieff told an audience at Trinity College in Dublin in 2005 that Canada had been trading on its “entirely bogus reputation as peacekeepers” for 40 years. If you are a human rights activist, he had said, “you have to go the Pentagon because no one else is serious.”

Ignatieff argued that Canadians had renounced their international citizenship and would rather complain about the United States than “pay the bill” of real internationalism.

He also attacked Canada (though, he said, “I love my country”) for its reflexive

anti-Americanism and becoming something “of a pretender on the world stage.”

Stop the presses! Ignatieff criticizes Canada! Ignatieff praises America! Heralding this j’accuse as a smoking gun, Maclean’s notes that the lecture and comments afterwards were “never reported” or “largely unnoticed” or “received brief attention.”

Maybe the reason was that Ignatieff said much of that in a lecture to Carleton University in November 2002. His critique of Canada’s decline in the world was illuminating and timely. It still is.

At the National Post, columnist Colby Cash describes the Isaiah Berlin Lecture that Ignatieff recently gave in London as “claptrap.” Cash laments that Ignatieff is now a politician, genetically incapable

of saying anything directly, doubting that Ignatieff had “ever wrestled with the questions” Berlin raised about liberalism and democracy.

Oh, dear. This would be the same Ignatieff whose life of Berlin The New York Times called “a model biography.” To Cash, though, Ignatieff is a lightweight.

But Cash has one point. When Ignatieff entered politics, he fell into caution and contrivance. Today he talks less freely and boldly. He needs to define himself more sharply, perhaps in a series of thematic speeches.

This political Ignatieff is why critics such as Ron Graham and Noah Richler, who are not ideologues, find fault with the fluid and engaging True Patriot Love.

Ignatieff began the book as a writer in 2000 and finished it as a politician in 2008. He had to compromise, and it shows.

Some critics, though, are plain silly. Alan Fotheringham, who knows well the

literary uses of humour and skepticism, likes to say that he invented Ignatieff. Now, he complains, “Ignatieff” comes up only four times in True Patriot Love, as if Ignatieff hadn’t covered that side of the family in his award-winning book, The Russian Album.

Dr. Foth calls True Patriot Love “a turkey,” even as it sits on the bestseller list.

There’s more. Andrew Potter suggests Ignatieff is no swifter than Stéphane Dion. Chantal Hébert has raised the Dion spectre, too, critical of Ignatieff’s election sabre-rattling in June, a view shared by Rex Murphy and Allan Gregg of the CBC.

Well, we’ll soon see about our patrician, our parvenu, our poseur. This much we know: In the summer of 2009, Michael Ignatieff leads the Liberal party after an unlikely bloodless succession last winter. He is challenging the Conservatives in the national polls and routing them in Quebec, where the election will be decided.

Our sojourner from Harvard has now served in Parliament longer than Pierre Trudeau or Brian Mulroney did before becoming prime minister. He has reconciled with Bob Rae and united his party, streamlined its fundraising, eliminated its debt, and mounted, on most days, an intelligent and eloquent opposition.

He is becoming political, which is why this gifted orator can give the listless speech he did to Liberals in Vancouver. He has made mistakes, sure, but most of them are more important to the chattering classes than to ordinary Canadians.

Yet Michael Ignatieff remains an extraordinary person who hasn’t failed at anything in life, who is now learning to be a professional politician. It takes time.

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