Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire. (A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him.) – Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, French poet and critic.
FREUNDEL STUART MAY BE DESCRIBED VARIOUSLY: too mulling a fellow, too thorough with his thoughts, too observant of the pros and cons, too long-suffering, slow to action and by extension slower to anger – which luckily just could save some of the Eager Brigade.
Indeed, what Mr Stuart has not been known to be is too hasty, frothy and unashamedly confusable.
All the Prime Ministers I know facing an Eager Brigade would have demoted half of the ministers said to be in it and fired the rest. We can expect no such ruthlessness from Mr Stuart – well not just yet. The man is definitely too slow to anger.
There has never been a time in Barbadian political history when the cruel efforts of driving a Prime Minister’s back against the wall – in the name of refreshed leadership – had been initiated from among his own ranks. Never till now was the appropriate maximum leader and Prime Minister of Government determined by ambition-cum-part-poll – a very small part at that.
A June CADRES poll among four constituencies – “two marginal DLP seats, a bellwether and one the party came close to winning” – ostensibly indicated “a real and present danger” of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) losing the next general election under Mr Stuart.
In addition, the said survey presented Chris Sinckler as “most favoured” in the same constituencies; and for CADRES this spoke “to a national preferential trend” – a “four to six per cent national swing against the DLP, which would theoretically remove it from office”.
To its credit, CADRES stressed that the survey was not national, but that based on the part-poll it was recommending that “the DLP explore these findings at the national level at the earliest opportunity and specifically seek to elucidate the leadership situation with a view to identifying the source of Stuart’s unpopularity in the hope that these issues can be addressed before it faces the polls in 2013”.
It seems that the “earliest time” of dealing with a June poll would be at Christmas. In this season of peace and goodwill we would have our governing politicians expressing political discontent and stirring strife over matters they ought to have been privy to and ought to have aired months ago.
If they didn’t want to give the calypsonians fodder for Crop Over, they could have made their move right after Rihanna’s LOUD Concert. Jay-Z wouldn’t have minded a bit.
Clearly, Democratic Labour Party MPs weren’t last weekend all of a sudden concerned about “perceived weaknesses in our leadership of the country” – not at a time when it appeared more and more Barbadians were warming to Mr Stuart!
It would be of profound interest what a poll in the aforementioned constituencies today would say of the Prime Minister’s leadership. But we can only speculate, can’t we?
On this I shall be quiet, for “even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding” – if I should quote Solomon (Proverbs 17:28).
In takeovers you succeed or fail. Attempted coups don’t cut it; you do or die. There is no in-between; no place for cold feet or frozen brains.
People love winners and despise losers; at best, mourn the latter.
It wouldn’t be unkind to mourn the Eager Brigade.
The DLP Government does not need this distraction, this mockery of political reformation. No kind of politically knowledgeable person can actually defend this bitter mirth the “concerned group” has plunged the electorate of this country into, in all the circumstances.
Weak is the argument that the action has been for the better of the party. Feebler yet is the pretence that it was for the good of country, this crudest form of selfishness.
Last weekend’s manoeuvre was obviously and painfully ill-advised. Ironically, the discipline of a Freundel Stuart would have been a useful restraint on the wayward.
