Did Tufton really expect to remain a senator?

By George Davis

Senators in Jamaica do not get paid. They earn a stipend of $17,000 for each sitting of the Senate or committee meeting which they attend.

Dorothy Lightbourne was a member of the Senate from 1984 to 2011, save for the five year period 1989 to 1994. In March 2011, while serving as leader of government business in the Senate, Ms Lightbourne noted wryly that she and her colleagues would wake up one day in their retirement and realise they were not due a pension for their years of toil.

Government senator Navel Clarke has, in the past, bemoaned the absence of a salary for pubic servants working in this position, while former senator Oswald Harding is on record from as far back as 2000 calling for a salary to be paid for the work done in the Upper House of Parliament.

Another former senator, Errol Miller, has written about how his five-year stint in the Parliament left him out of pocket, given all the travelling and other expenses he had to defray in order to serve the Jamaican people.

Given that there's no salary or pension in it, why then did Dr Christopher Tufton and Arthur Williams sacrifice a little of their masculinity by their mulish refusal to resign from the Senate and allow Andrew Holness room to appoint those he could trust to the positions?

Why dig in and force Holness to activate the unethical option and dispatch pre-signed letters of resignation to the governor general? Why could either man not have engaged common sense before creating a situation in which they've now become immortalised as the first parliamentarians in the history of Jamaica to be so removed from their posts?

Yes, Holness did wrong in this matter. A dirty, dastardly deed. But how else could he have got rid of two men whom he had told personally were not part of his plans going forward with his team of senators?

Dr Tufton is a bright man. No doubt. He's one of those politicians who many in the media have a lot of time for. But how could he hope to continue serving an opposition leader and the people of Jamaica, when a few weeks prior on the JLP election campaign trail, he told the same people that he had no confidence in said leader?

Who advised Tufton that after pumping molten lava through Holness' eyes, ears and nostrils by his now-infamous 'afraid of bright people' speech, he could cosy up back to the freshly minted leader and continue as he were? Which fool did this highly intelligent man buy this sack of dung from, paying for it with expensive US dollars?

The injury that Tufton did to Holness was not in the original speech at the Audley Shaw campaign launch at Manchester High School on September 29. It was in the justification speech, delivered on the UWI, Mona, campus on October 27, that the dagger was thrust into Holness' kidney.

INSECURE LEADER

Said Tufton then: "I want a leader who is not insecure. And, frankly speaking, I think Mr Holness has demonstrated a lot of insecurity in this campaign process. I make no apologies for what I say. A secure leader is all embracing. He doesn't make a distinction between who was at NDM or who was at PNP or who is brown or who is money class.

"A secure leader accommodates difference of views and benefits from it, too, because none of us has an autonomy on ideas, or on the letter 'E' for that matter."

So even if he is correct about Holness, how could he, after all of that, really expect to sit in the Senate? And not only did he expect to remain a senator, Tufton went on the front foot to assert that he was not resigning from the team assembled by the same insecure leader who we were told is petrified of bright people.

So rather than walk the moment his replacement leader lost the election, Tufton has given Holness the satisfaction of tearing a stripe off his shoulder. As for the gentleman Arthur Williams, the great conceptualiser and scribe of this most deadly of resignation letters, hush should suffice.

Selah.

George Davis is a journalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and george.s.davis@hotmail.com.