A marriage of convenience - Portia, Peter make uneasy, but necessary bedfellows

Martin Henry, Contributor

Political parties are strange things. They are populated by power-driven, egotistic people who are enemies who, in the pursuit of their ambitions, have agreed to be friends in order to defeat some bigger enemy (the other party) in the fight for state power.

And they are dangerous things. The internal and cross-party competition for power can sacrifice the larger public interest. And in Jamaica, the cross-party competition has been particularly vicious and deadly: Violence, tribalism, guns, garrisons - and gangs, which the parties themselves mirror as The Gleaner has been singing to much public agreement. The half has not been told about the viciousness of internal competition, although we get glimpses from 'bruk-outs'.

While political parties play some useful role in the democratic process, the division of the polity into contending factions pursuing their own agenda and interests poses a real and present danger to democratic freedoms and functioning.

The American founding fathers saw the danger of 'factions', warned about it, as first president George Washington did in his farewell address, and sought to take constitutional steps to guard against it. The sacrifice of independent representation by elected members of Parliament and the suppression of a diversity of views in the formation of public policy to the will of the parties is overwhelmingly evident in the Jamaican Parliament.

The natural state of 'war' inside political parties takes us to the WikiLeaks revelations of Peter Phillips' private views about Portia Simpson Miller, who beat him twice in competitions for the presidency of the People's National Party (PNP). The only surprise about this WikiLeaks 'bombshell' is the public revelation of frank, private conversations. Dr Peter Phillips did not tell American diplomats anything that his 'Solid as a Rock' campaign had not already publicly said against Simpson Miller and which senior party officials and members of the Government, which the party formed, like Maxine Henry-Wilson, Dr Omar Davies, and K.D. Knight, had publicly expressed.

Phillips' expressed reservations to the Americans, whose support he was obviously courting to advance his own ambitions, about serving in a future Simpson Miller-led Cabinet has been overcome - on both sides. He has now been assigned to shadow the second most powerful Cabinet post, finance. And he is campaign manager for the party with the task of getting Simpson Miller back as prime minister, the PNP back in power - and himself a senior minister of government in that Simpson Miller-led administration.

Simpson Miller perhaps 'dislikes' Peter Phillips as much as he dislikes her privately. But they need each other to advance personal ambitions and to advance the common interests of their party. In the nature of political parties, there is nothing particularly unusual about this collaboration of convenience. It is not peculiarly Jamaican or PNP. Hillary Clinton now holds the most powerful Cabinet post in the Obama administration as secretary of state after conducting a bitter and nasty contest for nomination as presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in which a lot of her true feelings about Barack Obama got revealed. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown accommodated each other in the last government formed by the British Labour Party, although Brown's stance after Blair's departure, and his ascendancy to the prime ministership, revealed significant rifts. Owen Arthur and Mia Mottley coexisted in the Barbados Labour Party and in government, and continue to coexist after the ugly clash of the titans for the leadership of the party.

Simmering tension

And there is hardly any question that there are personality clashes and tensions among the power-holders within the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Are there any WikiLeaks confirmations? We know that one minister in the Bruce Golding-led Cabinet thought it necessary to go behind the prime minister's back and privately apologise to the US Kingston Embassy for statements made by the prime minister about the Coke extradition.

None of the likeliest 'culprits' have been axed from the Cabinet in the recent reshuffle, or even had portfolio changes. But the minister of justice and attorney general, legal adviser to the Government, who was publicly supportive of the PM's stance on the constitutional rights of Coke, is gone. And Clive Mullings, who had been axed from the Cabinet over "irreconcilable" differences with the prime minister and was on his way out of representational politics, is back.

The public opinion of Edward Seaga, Golding's predecessor as leader of the JLP, that Golding is a dithering, indecisive man cannot be more widely held within the party - and the Government and Cabinet. Seaga had his loyalists who enforced his survival as party leader for decades and who still remain in the leadership ranks of the JLP. The ambitious, 'decisive' - and wily - Mike Henry and Pearnel Charles, who have mounted leadership challenges in the past, cannot simply be Golding idolisers. Karl Samuda, reportedly, had strains with the leader. Several younger leaders may simply be tolerating Golding as at the moment important to their own ambitions and interests.

So, to put it bluntly, Peter's trumpeted dislike of Portia (compliments returned!) is no political bombshell and shouldn't cause the PNP any great loss of sleep.

Phillips, in the soul-baring privacy of self-serving diplomatic conversations - now made public - has made far more consequential observations. He has described Simpson Miller as a disaster for the country, essentially unfit for the office of prime minister. Yet Simpson Miller is consistently the most popular politician in the country. In fact, her poll rating was a crucial factor in Phillips' reticence to challenge her a second time for the leadership of the PNP.

But suppose Peter Phillips, despite his obvious and distasteful self-serving exposé to a foreign power, is right in his assessment? The campaigns of the competitors against Simpson Miller for the presidency of the PNP made heavy weather of this very point of her lack of capacity for the office of prime minister.

It is not just a Phillips thing. Simpson Miller never enjoyed the majority support of the PNP parliamentary caucus. As the country's best historical journalist, Earl Moxam, allowed us to hear again, last Sunday, on his programme 'That's a Rap', Simpson Miller attributed her triumph over her challengers to the delegates of the party. Grass-roots delegates, the delegates in the vast majority, are the least informed and, perhaps, the least concerned about leadership capacity for governance. Who is warmest, and who loves the poor more, and who can handle a political stage better, is far more likely to have a favourable standing with the mass of delegates.

Despite the obvious self-serving ego factor, the front-seat opinion of Cabinet colleagues and of the party's parliamentary caucus ought, rationally, to carry more weight in decisions about leadership competence. But that's not 'democratic'. And there is no mechanism in a 'democratic' party for making this happen, although there are plenty of mechanisms available for seeking to steer delegates in particular directions.

Phillips - and the party - are caught in the difficult position of him leading the campaign for someone to return to the position of leader of government who, in his frank opinion, does not have the competence for the job and him serving in that Cabinet. And clearly the larger public interest for effective governance can go to hell. This is a massive negative in the nature and character of political parties.

The other thing of large consequence which Phillips discussed with American diplomats was Jamaica drifting towards becoming the English-speaking Haiti of the Caribbean. In fairness, nowhere in the WikiLeaks newspaper reports has Phillips said that his party had spent 18 years running Jamaica into the ground. Phillips is publicly and consistently on record criticising the political system, in general, of failures in driving secure development. From his perch as minister of national security, he has warned of the potential of transnational organised crime to destabilise the Jamaican state. His extraconstitutional MOUs with the government of the United States, the Coke extradition commission of enquiry report was willing to concede, were well-intentioned as steps to help deal with that threat.

The WikiLeaked pleadings of officials in this JLP Government to the US government for special understanding since the extradition of Christopher Coke, the strongman of the Tivoli Gardens garrison, could have a social and economic destabilising effect, back Phillips' publicly and privately expressed views on the business of governance for Haitianisation.

But Peter Phillips served as a powerful minister of several things in a long-running administration which helped to create and maintain the conditions for the Haitianisation of Jamaica. The fact that he did, and would do so again, just backs up the point being made about political parties and the dangers they pose to effective governance in the general public interest.

We are pretty clear what is going to happen next: the PNP unity motorcade will wrap Jamaica this week (hopefully, without violent incident). Differences among 'enemies' will be publicly patched over to seek to defeat a larger opponent. Portia wants to keep and win too much to ditch Peter. Peter wants to, shall we say, advance his political career too much to act upon his convictions about Portia. The next general election will, inevitably, arrive, with 'indecisive' Bruce pitted against 'disastrous' Portia, as judged by their own people. And Jamaica will have to choose one or the other and the political party they lead to form a government which may well continue to put party above country, taking us closer to Haiti.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.