G20: Laureen Harper, the summit’s First Lady

You should know, however, that Laureen’s Club, while privileged, appears to have a broad reach. After Stephen Harper became Conservative leader in 2002, journalists begin to mention, with obvious delight, the correspondence they received from a certain politician’s wife. To one she emailed impressions of a road trip from Calgary to Ottawa, with her son and brother. To another, after the 2006 Conservative minority win, she joked about having to convince the cable company a request for a hookup at 24 Sussex Dr. wasn’t a prank. To a third — and this is only a guess — she emails some of the tastiest tidbits to be found in a society diary for a national magazine.

She loves to diss, it would seem.

She’ll get a chance to do that with some of the most glamorous and well-informed women in the world — and who doesn’t like to diss? — when she takes a twirl as host to the leaders’ spouses at events during next week’s G20 Summit in Toronto. Summit officials decided to forgo the pleasures of Muskoka for spouses during the kickoff G8 summit. While it’s unclear who will attend, First Lady Michelle Obama and gorgeous former model Carla Bruni, wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are expected to be at the top of the paparazzi list.

International press coverage is a chance for Laureen Harper to strut in northern chic. “Her style has to reflect back on Canadian fashion,” says an Ottawa friend, Laura Peck, “but she has a great figure, she looks great in everything and she’s become friends with a variety of Canadian designers.”

“She’s fab,” says Deb Grey, once a Reform Party MP and Stephen Harper’s boss, who blurts out, “Are you kidding?” when asked if all the kind words about Laureen delivered in interviews with the Toronto Star are true. “Absolutely fabulous!”

Friends and observers describe a shrewd woman who appears to have had more influence in shaping her husband’s career and image than a multitude of professional spin doctors. That influence goes far beyond last October’s highly publicized event at the National Arts Centre, in which she arranged for Harper to play piano and sing the Beatles’ A Little Help From My Friends, accompanied by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

“She’s an enormous asset to him,” says long-time friend John Reynolds, who served as interim Canadian Alliance leader until Harper took over in 2002. “Of all the prime ministerial wives going back to Louis St. Laurent — and I guess I’m dating myself here — she’s probably the most astute of anyone we’ve ever had . . . She’s worked very, very hard to get him where he is today.”

“She is pretty political,” says Grey. “She reads people very well and has a good gut sense of what makes them tick.”

“She knows everything about computers,” says Peck. She’s “super aware of everything on the Internet — Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, you name it in social networking,” adds Warren Kinsella, author, pundit and political consultant. “She’s one of the savviest Internet users I’ve seen.”

When Kinsella recently told a big-time Hill journalist (also in the LH club) about his own emails, he was advised not to get cocky, because “it’s a pretty wide circle.” Kinsella says he’s gotten emails about everything from a column she liked to children and music.

“When you hear from the PM’s wife, it makes you feel important and special, and I doubt she’s unaware of that,” says Kinsella, who works in Liberal election war rooms. “But in my own experience, I’ve never, ever felt spun.

“She’s not manipulative. She struck me, from a distance, as earthy and really genuine . . . This is a charming person and people like her.

For someone who eschews media interviews on principle, she probably has more informal contact with influential journalists than any politician in town. (The PMO declined repeated Star requests for an interview.)

At a recent Maclean’s event, she posed in sleek summer white, blond hair glistening, with Kenneth Whyte, publisher of both Maclean’s and Chatelaine, in a room brimming with Conservative mucky-mucks, from Transport Minister John Baird to Senator Linda Frum.

During weeks of intrigue before the PM’s debut at the NAC, she lobbied Ma (already booked for the upcoming gala) at a Pittsburgh G20 event and, according to Peck, asked him: “Wouldn’t it be a blast” if the PM would perform too? Ma “loved it,” and she scored a coup as honorary NAC gala chair that erased the 2008 disaster. That year, she’d backed out of a similar role, after her husband’s unfortunate campaign crack about ordinary Canadians lacking sympathy for artists who whine about grants at “a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers.”

She was designing campaign posters for Grey before she met Harper at a Reform convention in Saskatoon, but was soon working on charts and graphs for his MA presentation, as well as political materials for him. They married in a small civil ceremony in their Calgary home in 1993 (Grey says she’s not big on religion) and have two children, Benjamin, 14, and Rachel, 9. While in her 20s, she was briefly married to a New Zealander she met trekking through Africa.

In his book Harper’s Team, Tom Flanagan, political scientist and former Harper adviser, describes how the candidate was ready to drop out of the 2002 race for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance (which had absorbed Reform), only to be challenged by a wife “as strong-willed as he is,” with exactly the right words: “If you don’t think you can do it, you should drop out now.”

Harper went on to co-found and become first leader of the new Conservative Party in 2004. But, without Laureen, he’d perhaps be an academic, fussing about new elbow patches for a favourite corduroy jacket.

“They make one hell of a political team,” says Kinsella.

Her four years at Sussex Dr. remind this veteran Washington correspondent of the way the White House sells its first family to the U.S. heartland. It’s all American-style glossy magazine spreads, chat TV and leaks galore.

She effortlessly manages her own image, and that of her family. PMO staffers reportedly refer to her as “first lady,” and in a lengthy 2006 article in Chatelaine, a reporter called her “first lady,” before noting: “Officially speaking, that isn’t even her role: in Canada, the role of first lady is performed by the Governor General.” Oh, really?

It’s very White House to let word slip out she’s having fashion pioneer Jeanne Becker over for dinner and a gab about Canadian designers. It’s noticed, too, when singer Jann Arden is a guest at the PMO summer residence at Harrington Lake (apparently picked up at the airport by a family friend in a van stuffed with kids’ gear and dog toys), or when rocker Bryan Adams drops by to jam with his good bud Steve.

If she wants to hang a Ted Harrison in the living room, she invites the artist over.

Recently, standing on the red carpet with actor Paul Gross for the Ottawa premiere of his new flick, Gunless, Laureen reportedly whipped out her iPhone and called his biggest fan, her sister, Diana, before passing the phone to Gross.

“She obviously picks very carefully what she’s going to do,” says political scientist Heather McIvor. “But there’s nothing to suggest she’s being managed in any way.”

Rather, it seems she’s doing the managing. She appears on CTV’s Canada AM, leading viewers on a tour through her private garden at Sussex, and allows the media to crowd into the butt end of a cow as she handily wins a milking contest. She later told Peck she won because another guy’s cow kicked over the can. She smiles her way through a “local produce” luncheon with wives of Conservative MPs, grace unflagging.

“She’s just a blast, she’s so much fun,” says Peck, an Ottawa management consultant who was her neighbour when the Harpers were at Stornoway, the official residence of the Leader of the Opposition. They love to gossip about life in “the ’hood,” as they call tony Rockcliffe. “She can do anything, she’s athletic, a good camper . . . she’s as handy as a pocket on a shirt.”

Laureen has the same asymmetrical beauty as Ellen Barkin, whom she resembles, and an easy charm that masks alleged shyness. She seems at ease on stage. At a Winnipeg party convention after the 2008 election, she introduced her husband with a speech that had the crowd alternately cheering and misty-eyed. She said the PM is “the man who has breakfast every morning with Rachel and her hamster . . . who babysits 12 children all by himself because my girlfriends and I want to go and see a chick flick . . . and, with the exception of all those Mounties with earpieces, Stephen is still the man I married in 1993.”

Family comes first for both Laureen and Stephen, according to another pair of political veterans, John and Yvonne Reynolds. “For Laureen, family is serious,” says Yvonne, adding she’s “a mother who knows how to make sure her children are okay.” Although political foes anonymously mock Harper for being a “stiff” for shaking hands with his kids, nobody suggests the Harpers use the kids as props.

She’s also proven her bona fides as a philanthropist, especially in offering her time. She climbs ladders in old clothes to decorate rooms for charity events and endlessly publicizes the Ottawa Humane Society and other rescue organizations. She takes in foster cats that sometimes don’t make it, breaking hearts.

“She has that philosophy,” says Yvonne Reynolds. “She has a social conscience, community conscience. She is the real deal. She likes to help and she doesn’t ask for credit.” She pauses before adding: “I’m honoured to say she’s a very dear friend.”

Sweetness doesn’t mean pushover, according to Grey. Laureen Teskey may have changed her last name to Harper after her husband became PM in 2006 (author William Johnson has both names indexed in his book Stephen Harper), but she’s no wilting flower from Wild Rose country.

Grey tells a story about arriving at Sussex shortly after the Conservatives won the 2006 election. At the front gate, she says, a Mountie on security duty told her: “Miss Grey, I owe you one.”

Turns out Laureen had politely listened to all the RCMP palaver about how she’d be chauffeured about in an armoured limo, then insisted — repeatedly — that, no, she would be riding her motorcycle, often with Rachel.

Knowing Grey is a big motorcycle buff, the Mountie mistakenly thought she’d turned her friend into a fan. That wasn’t necessary for the Turner Valley girl who grew up driving everything from tractors to dirt bikes. The Mountie, still on security duty, told Grey he was thrilled, explaining: “Because of you, I got a bike to ride with her.”

Unconventional. Or, as Grey puts it, “Pretty cool, eh?”