THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean KilpatrickPrime Minister Stephen Harper takes part in an economic question and answer session at Mansion House in London, England on Wednesday Sept. 3, 2014.

A foolish pundit may be a contradiction in terms, which isn’t to say that it’s a rarity. Foolish pundits are a dime a dozen. Perhaps the most foolish are the ones who volunteer to predict the results of elections — free, democratic, unrigged elections, that is. Predicting the other kind is punditry’s bread and butter, needless to say.

However, forecasting unrigged elections isn’t easy. Picking the daily double at the races is an exact science in comparison.

Just before Christmas 2013, a motorcade of three black cars stopped in front of a nondescript ranch house in the Varsity Village neighbourhood of Calgary. Plain-clothes RCMP stood guard as a figure emerged from one of the vehicles and knocked on the front door.

“There was enough warning to get coffee ready,” says Jim Hawkes.

Nobody would have faulted him for hating the tall, blue-eyed man standing on his front step.

As a Progressive Conservative MP for Calgary West, Hawkes had given him his first political job as a chief aide in Ottawa. But the young man soon defected to the upstart Reform Party and mounted a challenge to his old boss’s seat. On election day in 1993, a 34-year-old “Steve” sent his mentor to a humiliating third place.

That much said, some elections are undoubtedly easier to predict than others, and the temptation to predict the former can be overwhelming. I have no great appetite for making political forecasts, but in April 2002, even I felt compelled to write that “newly elected Alliance leader Stephen Harper, 42, will become Canada’s prime minister one day.” Frankly, I expected that day to be about six years distant, but I prudently refrained from saying so.

It was a good thing I did. Only two years later, in March 2004, that day seemed just around the corner.

Eleven years ago, in the spring of 2004, it was becoming evident that, if existing trends continued, the Liberals would appear less and less attractive to the electorate, partly due to the pendular dynamics of electoral politics — the Liberals were coming to the end of their cycle — and partly because Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s party had been sliding, in historian Michael Bliss’s words, “into a stagnant ditch of arrogance and self-satisfaction.”

This meant that if Harper made no egregious errors, he’d increase his support between 2002 and the next election, which would probably occur in 2004. The Liberals would still win that election handily, but with reduced support. The combined votes of the two centre-right parties might amount to a majority, which in turn would offer an incentive for them to unite. The united centre-right party would presumably have the good sense to elect Harper as its leader and in the election that followed, he would be in the running for the top job. He could become prime minister by 2008, well before turning 50.

The smart money was still on the Liberals in 2004, but by then the election offered the odds of a horse race rather than that of a lottery

Two things altered this timetable. First, the Tories and Canadian Alliance didn’t wait for the election of 2004 to unite. Second, following Chrétien’s retirement, the scandal-ridden Liberals lost ground more rapidly than anyone could have predicted in 2002.

The smart money was still on the Liberals in 2004, but by then the election offered the odds of a horse race rather than that of a lottery. Harper’s chances shot up from one in a million to about one in 30. He was still the outsider and Paul Martin was still the favourite, but suddenly the two were running in the same race.

Earlier, though, the newly united right nearly obliterated its chances by featuring Belinda Stronach in the leadership contest. Had she won, it would have been all over. With Stronach in the saddle, the Conservatives wouldn’t have been in the same race no matter how much momentum the Liberals had lost. Just by letting a contestant who clearly wasn’t up to speed enter the starting gate, the Conservatives would have signalled that they weren’t taking the event seriously.

Harper was a serious contestant, all right — perhaps too calculatedly serious for his own electability, some of my colleagues thought. Today, in 2015, 11 years later, some still do. I don’t.

The Conservative leader, who seemed too new then, and too shopworn today for some political observers, is a mixture of flaws and virtues, like most human beings. It’s his virtues that made him a successful prime ministers over the years, but it’s his flaws that made him a prime minister in the first place — and may do so again.

Harper’s intelligence, erudition and judgment — all qualities that add up to the making of a good prime minister — wouldn’t have won him the office in 2006, not even as head of a minority government. Showmanship, personality and even a capacity for mawkish sentiment, would have served him better, but Harper never had an overabundance of showmanship or sentimentality, and although he did have a quiet sense of humor, he tended to suppress it because experience taught him that it didn’t serve him well. What served him better was a quality that could be described as — well, Canadian. In fact, that’s how I described it at the time. Not exactly awkward or maladroit, only a trifle impersonal, even grey. Low-key. It could even be mistaken for being cold or heartless, as a Toronto columnist did the other day.