Dr Peter Phillips and those senior members of the People's National Party (PNP) who supported his failed challenge to Portia Simpson Miller's leadership of the PNP, followed the only decent course when they resigned their party posts to give Mrs Simpson Miller a free hand to restructure the party.

There is, however, expected speculation about the political future of Dr Phillips and his backers and how Mrs Simpson Miller should go about healing the wounds and fashioning her party into a credible institution, deserving of holding office in Jamaica.

We believe that Dr Phillips has a worthwhile political future and Mrs Simpson Miller can redeem the PNP; but neither way need be pursued in that frothy, love-in atmosphere that PNP diehards and too many 'analysts' posit as the way forward.

Instinct and temperament

By instinct and temperament, Mrs Simpson Miller is not one who readily gives quarter if crossed. She doesn't forget quickly nor does she forgive easily. In any event, the pragmatists, in and outside the party, need not be reminded that the leadership race was a bruising contest in which harsh things were said by each side about the other. One side won, and as Dr Phillips himself remarked, there are bound to be political consequences. But the victor must not misread or overreach.

For while 54 per cent of the delegates' votes gave Mrs Simpson Miller a credible majority, it was, in the context of a political party, hardly a sweeping mandate. There is no carte blanche for the kind of house cleaning that Mrs Simpson Miller implied she should have carried out when she first won the party's presidency in 2006. The point is, Peter Phillips' message that the PNP was heading in the wrong direction, having lost its way as a party of ideas, clearly found traction among a significant number of the delegates and party supporters.

Post-victory hubris

It is, perhaps, a growing recognition of this fact that after the post-victory hubris of Mrs Simpson Miller, there appears to be a tempering by some of her key allies of the simplistic class warfare to which the Phillips challenge was reduced - as if only an intellectual elite comprised that substantial bloc of delegates who cast ballots for Dr Phillips.

So, there is Colin Campbell's acceptance that the PNP may in the future win elections with support from the unskilled working class and the poor, but can't govern effectively without the middle class. In that sense, the PNP has to recapture its old self as an alliance of classes if it is to be viable and Mrs Simpson Miller is to be successful.

The PNP, therefore, has to configure itself into a modern, structured organisation ready to formulate policies for a complex global environment. It has to debate ideas, rather than being an intellectually comatose facilitator of corruption, cronyism and the politics of the garrison. Mrs Simpson Miller can begin to accomplish this not by necessarily packing her shadow Cabinet with declared Phillips supporters, but by creating an environment for debate and intellectual rigour in the PNP.

Dr Phillips, and his supporters, now on the backbenches, and freed of the strictures of high office are, perversely, in a good position to become the conscience of the PNP and to lead the dialogue. That would only be good for Jamaica.

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