creole@wow.net

Fateful embrace of policy tar baby

At first sight, the Holy Thursday headline, “PM fighting cross-examination,” reads more like history than news.

That Prime Minister Patrick Manning is still “fighting” something or other in the courts is surprising to those who thought he had by now “moved on” to fight another day—this time on the hustings.

Even if it looks otherwise, Parliament hasn’t yet been dissolved, nor any election writ issued. But Mr Manning these days leaves hardly any doubt that he’s running hard for something.

Meanwhile, the Government as a whole is urgently transforming itself into an election war machine, firing vote-catching messages from all barrels.

On the same day that Public Administration Minister Lenny Saith signs off $886 million in pay rises to public servants, a durable old warrior in former Port-of-Spain Mayor Telly Paul is produced on TV to announce the impending arrival on the streets of some 200 new buses.

Is this competition, then, on the freshly paved and well-lit streets and roads, for the water taxis with which Transport Minister Colm Imbert has been planning to make his own waves by July? Or will these start-and-stop leviathans not worsen congestion among the shoals of smaller vehicles trying to get by?

Minor matters, if the Government can be shown as gesturing heroically to dispel the traffic nightmare.

Again, the ruling party has been using its candidate-screening ritual to advertise not only its organisational readiness but also the abundance of people ambitious enough to present themselves as candidates for the PNM election candidacies.

If the UNC may yet count an Olympics star on its team, and the COP could flaunt a Presentation brother, plus a former army captain, the PNM could trump all that with its own former army major who was also a Catholic priest.

The flaunting and the taunting; the walkabouts and the stunts as corny as kissing babies and as rare and rich as establishing a crime commission with foreign experts: such is the content of the pre-campaign campaigning in an election season of plenty.

As he leads the almost all-out, if undeclared, PNM re-election campaign, however, the Prime Minister is obliged to defend a flank still vulnerably exposed in the courts.

Mr Manning’s newest courtroom “fight” appears as an unscheduled reprise of legal contests long thought superseded by newer ones, or frustrated into phony-war inaction by checkmate moves and delays.

It was thus instructive that a matter connected with the name Naraynsingh was still lively enough to claim headlines today. What survived the spectacular flame-outs of the Naraynsingh murder prosecutions, however, was the collateral thrust against Chief Justice Sharma for allegedly meddling in the matter.

The first strike at unseating the CJ by means of now-familiar Section 137 landed somewhere in the dead sea of mediation. Mr Sharma’s fight-back grinds on in the judicial-review court where he offered to take the stand himself.

His lawyers moved also to put on the stand a star-studded cast: Mr Manning, Appeal Justice Roger Hamel-Smith, Attorney General John Jeremie, and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Last week, as it turned out, this process was not just dragging through the court like a half-dead formality. The Newsday story reporting Mr Manning’s resistance was illustrated by a photo of British Queen’s Counsel Mark Strachan, defending the Prime Minister, literally leading Senior Counsel Douglas Mendes into the High Court.

Beating back efforts to put Mr Manning on the stand warranted recourse to legal help beyond the local bar.

Which is now a stock response in this golden age of plenty. As is happening in design and construction of prestige projects, and in policing, so, too, in the courts: the high-end help called for can come only from abroad.

The result has been the continuing parade on Knox and St Vincent Streets of gowned grandees for guineas—British Queen’s Counsel—among them, one lord and at least one knight.

Now indispensable, the British QCs find as familiar a place as does premium Scotch whisky on the all-inclusive groaning boards of both the public and the private plutocratic power elite.

Everybody who’s somebody is doing it. Chief Magistrate Sherman Mc Nicolls must now be ruing his decision to misadvise himself against taking the witness stand. Like the Prime Minister, he too could have deployed a QC to block or frustrate Senior Counsel Pamela Elder’s punitive purpose to grill him on the stand like a leg of lamb.

For that, Mr Mc Nicolls has since been called “crass and stupid” by Sir Timothy Cassel QC, speaking, indeed, for the State.

Mr Manning plans to not to fall into similar, damnable, error. By last month, its five-year prosecutorial project against the UNC and other foes had produced for his administration mostly bruising courtroom battles, lingering wounds, and legal fees soaring into the billions.

“I spend money on punishing wrongdoing,” said Attorney General Jeremie. “That is the hallmark of my administration.” Uttered after the Panday reversal, those words might well have been composed for his political epitaph.

Quick on his feet after Sherman Mc Nicolls had suicide-bombed the prosecution of Sat Sharma, Mr Manning called a news conference at Balisier House. He was signalling to the party and the world the possibility of abundant political life beyond the courthouse.

In all but name, that event was the launch, if hurriedly, of the PNM election campaign. Still, then, one pillar of the PNM platform—the execration of “convicted felon” Basdeo Panday—remained connected to the courthouse.

And soon, in still further undoing, that pillar would itself crumble when the Panday conviction was overturned. By then, however, the Balisier campaign was on the road, redoubling efforts to distract attention from the PNM charnel house the courthouse has been proving to be.

But last week’s cameo performance of the British QC for Mr Manning was a reminder that the prosecutorial project his administration had embraced as policy is a tar baby from which it cannot disengage.