Dawn Ritch, Columnist

Some people find my high praises for the Prime Minister and disgust for her Finance Minister a little puzzling. They insist that the two are linked.

This is both true and deeply unfortunate. But it cannot last. I don't spend much time looking at the link, therefore, except to say that they shouldn't be in the same room, much less the same Cabinet.

This is where I breathe a sigh of relief amid rampant frustration. This is not a new Cabinet. This is the same Cabinet of former PNP Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, and readers will remember I thought very little of his administration.

Leftovers

This is, therefore, her Cabinet with his leftovers. One can hardly expect any improvement in their performance, when their continuing in Cabinet at all is clear reward for failure.

A fat, lazy and complacent government is one thing, but a fat, lazy and complacent political party organisation is quite another. The interregnum between Mrs. Simpson Miller's ascension to the presidency of the PNP and the next general election is therefore, cause for great concern.

If there's any similarity between the performance of her Finance Minister, most of his Cabinet colleagues, and that of the PNP party organisation itself, this bodes ill for the latter's chances in the next general election. Madam Prime Minister would be looking at a loss on a spectacular scale.

The votes for Portia cannot be expected to levitate into a ballot box on election day all on their own. Abstract qualities like support and loyalty cannot, by themselves, mark the 'X' beside the PNP head. It takes a party organisation to mobilise that vote, and that takes money.

Since I resent every dime spent on either the PNP or the Jamaica Labour Party and its off shoots, this recognition understandably fills me with pain.

I've been asked why it has taken Portia over a year to unify the PNP, and the task may still not be complete. What is more, they say, it took Patterson no time at all to unify the party after he won. He went on to call a general election one year after that, and won it hands down. What's wrong with her? they ask.

Well it's simple. P.J. Patterson had only one opponent and she was Portia Simpson Miller.

In 1992, when she lost the presidency of the PNP, she didn't go into any little room and meet with anybody. Anyone who had supported her had long since fled the scene anyhow. When she looked over her shoulder there was no one there.

Not a soul, it seems, has noticed that after she lost, Mrs. Simpson Miller just folded herself up like a pocket knife, and put herself into the top drawer. During his regime, Patterson kept taking the pocket knife out and flinging it into every ministry he could find, much to her public embarrassment but, no doubt, greater education. He also put her on the street to calm every disturbance.

In 2006, she returned to the hustings and prevailed over Dr. Karl Blythe, Dr. Peter Phillips and Dr. Omar Davies. There have been sour faces and a sense of drift ever since. She's doing the best she can with them, but it was a lost cause from the very beginning.

Admirable

So I don't berate her over that, because these were not her choices. It is admirable that she should bother to continue with them for any reason, even politics.

That is the course that she has chosen in order that three men and their supporters sulking in the PNP can be allowed to settle down. And all this without vilification. Better she than me.

Nevertheless, one can't help being completely attracted to the spectacle. I've never seen anything like it before. Never before someone with her connection to the people, not even Michael Manley. If she is scorned and ridiculed in any quarter, it is simply because she is not the representative of the Jamaica Labour Party.

Everybody knows that the JLP is a black man and 'dutty Labourite' party. We also know that the PNP is the comrade and 'browning' party, the heart of the intelligentsia.

Bruce Golding would have made a far more believable president of the PNP. Mrs. Simpson Miller should have come from the JLP. Had she arisen in that party, not a soul would have questioned her accession to high office. But that comfort zone does not exist.

As an observer, therefore, it is hugely exciting to be living at a time when the leadership of the two major parties is so patently mismatched.

The Jamaica Labour Party, in or out of power, makes no secret of who is leaving their ranks, and when. Once the person has left, there is always at least six weeks of public acrimony in the press. Every piece of dirty linen is hung out to dry.

The persona of Mrs. Simpson Miller is more like that of a Labourite, but she really is a Comrade. More than that, she is the Comrade leader. Her opponents in last year's PNP presidential contest may have fainted because they were temporarily overwhelmed by Labourite vapours, and began to behave like them. But all she's ever been, and will ever be, is a Comrade through and through.

This means that Madame Prime Minister's priority is the unity of her party. Everybody is going to be given equal opportunity to make bigger asses of themselves, or shine and prove themselves able and competent.

It is she who has neither been a sore loser, nor a vindictive victor. The injustice done her is almost of biblical proportions.

Mandate

Until Mrs. Simpson Miller gets her own mandate from the Jamaican people, however, she is not really in charge of the Government. She is a titular, or caretaker Prime Minister. I'm amazed that she's at all prepared to put up with the public ridicule of keeping on the old Cabinet. This gives her responsibility without authority, but not a Comrade will be able to say she didn't try. Lisa Hanna would do better than any one of them.

With such forbearance on public display now, it cannot be long before Mrs. Simpson Miller launches an attack. Leaders lead only because they're prepared to attack. An accusation of bias in the press which daily criticises her can hardly count as an attack upon a soul, and must be fair comment. Who wouldn't want to stick around to see what happens next?

In any event, the proper thing for useless, silly people to do is offer their resignations. So coarsened has life become that we'd all rather see heads roll than resignations. It's a mistake to think that Mrs. Simpson Miller might not give the people what they want.