AS?TIME?HEALS?THE?PAIN every Barbadian will mentally select, frame and store his or her favourite memory of late Prime Minister David Thompson.
At one end, I have already starting reviewing mental clips of a slender, bespectacled schoolboy debating on my 13-inch black and white, one channel TV, with the wisdom, storehouse of knowledge, wit and intellect of a person several times his age.
At the other end, are several social memories of sharing space, a fishcake or two and a drink or two with him at various entertainment events; and of coordinating his tasks at client functions like the opening of the Apes Hill Golf Course and the launch of the new Port Ferdinand marina.
But somewhere between these two ends of my spectrum is framed my favourite memory of David Thompson.
At the time, as we say in Barbados, he was still a boy to me but circumstances had conspired to place on his slender shoulders the mantle of leadership of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and, in his hand, a wooden battle axe with which to fight to regain political governance of Barbados.
The year was 1994 and then Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford had resigned as party leader after losing a no-confidence motion brought the then opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) and supported by some members of his own party.
September 6 was set as the date for a new general election, two years before being constitutionally due, and one morning within days of the bell being rung, I received a call from DLP stalwart Frank DaSilva asking if I was working with the campaigns of any of the two other parties: BLP or NDP.
When I answered in the negative, he informed me that David wanted to know if I would be willing to work with him. But, before I could reply yeah or nay, Frank quickly pointed out that the party had very few funds in its campaign tot and, as a result, they could not guarantee that I would be paid for my services.
I agreed, despite that assurance and in spite of the fact that nearly everybody in Barbados felt that his party’s chances were slimmer than those of a sno-cone in the Gobi Desert. Most also believed he was too young to be a Prime Minister and felt he should bide his time.
The very next day I sat down with David Thompson and his team to plan and strategise the campaign, a campaign in which, unlike his biblical namesake, the events of the preceding months had stripped him of both the sling and stones with which to battle a potential goliath in Owen Arthur.
I was responsible for media and other communications for the campaign but was also involved with providing the public with the true image of David as a politician who was equipped with all the qualities necessary to lead the country. During the weeks before polling day, he lived up to all the team’s expectations but was too heavily weighted with the inherited baggage to pull it off. Nevertheless, he was not disgraced and brought home eight more seats than the “none people” had speculated.
I was employed by the BLP in the following general election, but David never saw me as “the enemy”, so much so that days after becoming Prime Minister in January 2008, he sent me his email address and cellphone numbers with the instruction to shout him any time I needed to.
Long live his memories.
