Pierre Trudeau

Fire and earth take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in air and water, and five of the ten are fixed. Venus, Mars and Saturn fill ten degrees of Virgo. The record says Trudeau was prime minister for fifteen years, that he patriated the constitution and brought in the Charter of Rights, and that he decriminalised homosexuality with the line that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.

Venus sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at four hundredths of a degree, which is about as exact as a contact comes, and the reading is ease and goodwill: social luck, and a genuine capacity for enjoyment that the vocabulary treats as a real asset rather than a frivolity. For a prime minister the record remembers partly for a sentence, that is a fit a reader will accept at once, and it is also the most flattering reading available anywhere in the chart, which is reason enough to say that the orb is doing the work rather than the insight.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Pluto at half a degree, which the vocabulary calls depth without strain: strategy, persuasion, and an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable information. A record made of a constitution brought home, a charter of rights, and a law repealed with a joke about bedrooms is persuasion in three separate registers, and a tolerance for uncomfortable information is most of what the third one needed. Mercury also sits sixty degrees from Saturn at a quarter of a degree, structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration, which for fifteen years in the job is the duller and more useful of the two.

Saturn sits sixty degrees from Pluto at just over a quarter of a degree, durable strength: rebuilding after loss, and authority that has genuinely been earned, and that is a slow pair shared with a cohort rather than owned by him. His Moon sits on the twenty fifth degree of Leo at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out, and a three planet Leo group drops to two with it. Uranus and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Montreal on 28 September 2000, at eighty, in the city of his birth. Jupiter stood sixty degrees from his natal Neptune at a tenth of a degree that day and Venus sixty degrees from his natal Mars at under a quarter. The Moon was new and one per cent lit.