Mayor of Mayhem review – a jaw-dropping look at a crack-smoking politician who opened the floodgates

The Guardian

17-06-2025

I am surprised at how often 2013 feels like a lifetime ago, in political terms at least. That was the year the late Rob Ford, then mayor of Toronto, was reported to have been filmed smoking crack cocaine. He denied it, twisting the allegations into what he suggested was a smear campaign by an untrustworthy, left-leaning mainstream media. A few months later, the city's chief of police, Bill Blair, held a press conference in which he announced that the police had the video in question, and it showed Ford smoking a glass pipe. The mayor was defiant. 'I have no reason to resign,' he said. He didn't.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem manages to squash the chaos of Ford's many scandals into an appropriately hectic 49 minutes of documentary. (The fact that the police reporting the existence of a crack pipe video is only one of these scandals is telling: a reporter here vividly likens the number of controversies surrounding Ford to 'sweat off a runner'.) It provides a brief account of his entry into politics, and viewers with an interest in the psyche of 'controversial' politicians will be amazed and astonished to learn that, like Donald Trump, Ford was probably motivated by wanting to impress his tough millionaire businessman father, who had been a bellicose politician himself.
Ford won Toronto's mayoral race by a landslide in 2010. He was straight-talking, rightwing, and positioned himself as being on the outside of a wasteful and excessively bureaucratic system; he was appealing, says one observer, to both 'bankers and bus drivers'. There were initial reports of earlier controversies, yet to blossom into full-blown scandals: prior drug- and alcohol-related arrests, accounts of him disappearing from official duties to coach a local high school football team. They rippled to the surface and dissipated quickly. Ford said he was only human, and his supporters lapped it up.
By 2013, however, reporters and journalists began to hear more stories. Ford's chief of staff, Mark Towhey, recalls a military gala where Ford arrived dishevelled and inebriated, eventually getting Towhey in a headlock. It opened the floodgates to reports of the existence of the first crack-pipe video. The subsequent circus of controversy and chaos turned Ford into an international figure, and, many argue, a punchline. Even so, half of Toronto's residents still thought the video had been fabricated. Towhey says that when he confronted his boss about it, he was troubled that Ford said, 'There is no video,' rather than, 'I didn't do it.'
Reporters and staff members recall their time in the Ford family whirlwind with varying degrees of amusement, exasperation and even fondness. It is this cocktail of reactions that makes the story so tempting to view as a model for the populist wave to come. It is easy to transpose Ford's tactics on to Trump's electoral successes, for example. He sowed the seeds of doubt when it came to institutions offering checks and balances on his power. He bamboozled observers, supporters and detractors by repeatedly transgressing boundaries. All of this made it difficult for the electorate to know what to believe. This version of politics as spectacle, no matter what it is that the spectacle is comprised of, has become mainstream in many western nations. There's no such thing as bad publicity, indeed.
The tragedy of this zippy documentary is that what was shocking back in 2013 has become relatively ordinary. Ford is shown repeatedly jostling with crowds of reporters. He makes outrageous statements. He admits to smoking crack, and blames being in a 'drunken stupor' for his poor decisions. Still, he doesn't resign. The idea of a public becoming numb to boundary-busting behaviour is floated, very briefly, though there is nowhere near enough time to get into the thick of it. Neither is there space to address the fact that, while this is a story of politics, it is also a story about drugs and alcohol and addiction. At the end, there is the briefest suggestion that Ford had a good side and a bad side, and that he did good, and bad, things for the city. It feels tacked on and trite, and the opportunity to go further is thrown away.
But this is jaw-dropping, and provocative, and a reminder of how certain parts of the western world got to where we are. The first Trainwreck, in 2022, was about the horrors of the Woodstock 99 music festival, which descended into a soup of greed, violence and riots. It used its three episodes wisely. Mayor of Mayhem is a frantic, surface retelling of a much more complex, and much more intriguing, story.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem is on Netflix now.