The question being asked about me at cocktail parties, I'm told, is how I could be doing this to Brian Mulroney -"this" being the spate of interviews in which I've been relating what I witnessed while working in the Prime Minister's Office. It's also being said, as if to prove the point, that I would not have done "this" to Bill Bennett, whom I served years earlier as deputy minister. The simple answer is that the media are interested in what I know about the Bear Head project, which would have seen Light Army Vehicles built in Nova Scotia. That project, championed by Karlheinz Schreiber, increasingly seems to be at the heart of the so-called Airbus affair.

My initial reaction to all this cocktail chatter was to wonder where these people were in 1995, when the RCMP asked for a sworn statement about the project. What I told them ended up being quoted in the letter to the Swiss that produced Mr. Mulroney's defamation suit and a $2.1-million settlement in his favour. For his part, Mr. Schreiber says the letter gave him the first inkling that Mr. Mulroney, whom he hired in 1993 to lobby for the Bear Head project, had actually killed it three years earlier when I advised him of its true cost.

Mr. Mulroney, too, has cited my statement to the RCMP - as proof of his bona fides, which it decidedly was at the time. In fact, I've often contrasted his behaviour with the pressure to approve certain projects brought to bear by Liberal minister David Dingwall when I was president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), which led to my resignation from the public service.

When I mention all this to the friend who's been relating the criticism, I'm met with a bemused smile - as if to say that only he and I would be expected to remember events that transpired in the 1990s.

Apparently, nor do folks on the cocktail circuit know that, as recently as three years ago, I contributed a chapter to William Kaplan's book A Secret Trial .

Mr. Kaplan is the lawyer and historian who broke the story in The Globe and Mail of the three cash payments to Mr. Mulroney. He got the story from reporter Philip Mathias, after his paper, the National Post, killed his scoop, which had already been scrutinized by libel lawyers. Mr. Kaplan related all this in A Secret Trial , and also revealed that journalist Stevie Cameron had been a coded RCMP informant - as Mr. Mulroney took great pains to emphasize during his testimony last week.

Incredibly, Mr. Kaplan's book was met with resounding silence, including in British Columbia. Perhaps taking its signal from the Post's decision to kill the story of the cash payments, the Vancouver Sun, along with most CanWest papers, did not even review it. In fact, it was not until a month ago that Mr. Kaplan's A Secret Trial was first mentioned by a Sun journalist.

Today, of course, the story of the cash payments to Mr. Mulroney is on everyone's lips. And, frankly, the feedback I'm receiving has caused me to re-examine my understanding of the concept of loyalty.

We're not, of course, dealing here with the loyalty due to kith and kin; in fact, I hardly knew either Mr. Mulroney or Mr. Bennett when I joined his staff. And, while it's true that in politics "you dance with the one who brung you" - as Mr. Mulroney would often say - I've never been a member of any political party. In fact, I remained a public servant while serving both Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Bennett; as such, I owed loyalty to the public and to their two offices.

It's this loyalty that led me to agree to tell my story when the RCMP came calling in 1995. Nearly a decade later, after learning of the cash payments to Mr. Mulroney and suspecting that there's more here than meets the eye, the loyalty I owe to the truth and to history convinced me to contribute to William Kaplan's book. And it's exactly the same concept of loyalty that led me to relate my experience working in the Premier's Office to Bob Plecas, the author of a book that did receive a good deal of attention in British Columbia:

"Of all the politicians I've known," Mr. Plecas quotes me in Bill Bennett: A Mandarin's View , "he is number one . . . for standing on principle. Obviously, he's a politician. . . . But you always felt that he was in it for principled reasons . . . not personal gain."