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| The future of Flambeau |
He’s had seven years. He’s been lucky and he has been
unbelievable audacious, courageous beyond moral reckoning. Maybe it’s almost
over for him. Maybe Frederick is going
to go down with King’s ship.
But maybe not.
Make no mistake, Richard Frederick has options, if King
loses to Chas, when the UWP holds their first ever real leadership contest. (In
fact, it may be a first in the history of the country. Pretty much every
political leader before that has been
elected unopposed, negotiated, parachuted or otherwise wangled into the
leadership.)
No one doubts that
Frederick has genuine feelings of fealty and friendship for Steve. (Stop
that laughing, this very instant!) From the start, Richard has been Steve’s
number one defender, his Cardinal
Richelieu,his Thomas (both Wolseley and More) and his Desmond
Brathwaite, rolled into one.
Okay, maybe I’m laying the cheese paste a little thick.
Some doubt Richard’s
sincerity. They remember that he was an independent candidate who was
brought in despite the misgivings of the ancient god of all things Flambeau,
Sir John Compton. They cast aspersions on his tried and true Flambeau-ticity,
painting him as conveniently Flambeau-matic, at best, Flambeau-ostic and at worst, Flambeau-tatious.
From their perspective, he’s not King’s Richelieu. He’s
King’s George Odlum, the Manley to his Bustamante, the Brutus to his Caesar
(Stop laughing! Especially you, Hilaire and Tennyson and the rest of y’all in
the Red section!), not a mere Cassius, but a Caesar himself, to King’s doomed
Pompey.
As Chas’ chances of
becoming PL/UWP increase, there are rapturous whisperings among this silent
majority of Flambeau that Frederick’s days are numbered.
The truth is, King is
the one whose days are numbered. Without support to keep at least the
Leadership of the Opposition in Parliament, he’ll wither away on the
back-benches until he finds his true level – as a constituency level
pawn-broker and, if he’s lucky, a player on the party executive.
He was good enough at these things to make Cybelle Cenac
into a winning candidate, support Vaughan Lewis against John Compton and then,
wangle his way to deposing Cybelle and installing himself as candidate, as John
Compton’s right hand man in Parliament and Cabinet and finally, into the Prime
Ministership.
As King himself
admits, he never dreamed of being Prime Minister. He never thought of
himself as prime ministerial material until it fell into his lucky lap. He
never prepared for such an event and it showed. His success in becoming and remaining the leader of Flambeau has, in
the end, made him the unwitting symbol of everything that’s wrong with the
party and has to change.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF
ANIMAL
Frederick, meanwhile, is a totally different kind of animal.
He is not a creature of any political party. If there is one politician alive in the
island who can claim to be self-made, it’s Richard Frederick. (Kenny was
created by Labour, Vaughan Lewis was mis-created by Compton and Brathwaite, Morella
Joseph was uncreated and King was an evolutionary accident. Most others, with
the possible exception of Spider and the two women in Cabinet, are creatures of
their party.
Both John Compton and George Odlum are dead. And frankly, I refuse
to dishonor Hunter Francois by speaking of The Greatest Prime Minister we never
had in the same breath as the honorable personages mentioned above.)
He is a power generator completely independent of the
Flambeau power grid, bringing new energy to them. He rose, not just to
prominence, but to Parliament, on his own steam and unique insight into the
true heart of the majority of the people of Castries Central. His brutal, but true, insights brought a
whole new demographic, both in age and economic class to Flambeau’s cause in
the last seven years.
And he has maintained this new demographic as his loyal,
personal power base. (He is the only politician who practically has his own
Praetorian guard and a personal retinue of 13 deadly concubines. lol)
From his self-created
power base, he cannot be destroyed. Not even perturbed. Not by politics as
usual. Because he’s not politics as usual. Events and whisperings that
would have precipitated the downfall of others were like mosquito bites to him.
King or no King, they can’t get rid of him.
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| Not your side. Your back. You have to watch your back. |
Not without endangering a large portion of their young,
non-middle class supporters. In effect, he’s the Cardinal, nay, the pope of Flambeau’s Church of the
Ghetto Youth.
His weakness,
ironically, is that he is too much of an independent power. He is heedless
of the complex balances and interactions that must take place to stabilize the
infant post-Compton Flambeau.
And so, rather than rallying to his every cause, tried and true Flambeaus, regard him with
skepticism and are always satisfied to leave him contained within the bounds of
his powerful cult, never to cross over into the realm of high party office.
This de facto policy of containment is precisely why
Frederick has failed to win any bid for executive office in Flambeau, in spite
of being one of its single most beloved figures and most powerful magnets. A just reward for saving the party from
near-certain suicide in 2006, don’t you think?
Like a bunch of wildebeest who have cornered a lion, they
have him contained. But containment is all it is. It’s all they have against him
and his new practice and theory of politics. He cannot be confronted. Not with
the current deficits of courage and moral fortitude within Flambeau.
And Frederick, while posing as the pitbull, the maverick,
the bulldozer and the runaway train (‘loose cannon is still reserved for Keith
Mondesir, and after that, Allen Chastanet has dibs), has proven to be rather
nimble in rallying strategic partners to his ends, if not to his cause in
general.
The result?
Though he has been
kept from high office in the party, he was one of Flambeau’s most powerful
ministers and remains one of its most influential forces today.
Whether King loses or not, that is not going to change. The
great River Richard will find his way around Mt. Chastanet and begin the
attrition, the slow work of taking the mountain down. Rivers always win in the
end.
Some mountains just like to drag out the suffering.
THE MARRIAGE OF
FREDERICK AND CHAS
Then…there’s the possibility that Richard and Chas might
heed each other and begin to need each other, especially in the face of the
sweeping attacks currently underway from Labour. They may feed each other’s
quest for glory and power. (It seems convenient. Chas wants the glory and
Richard wants the power.)
In a world that makes sense, these two natural enemies ought
to realize that they are made of the same philosophical DNA. And while their
styles may be abhorrent to each other, their ultimate ends are very much the
same.
Like Compton and
Mallet, they could form the new lever that lifts Flambeau back to power and
stop the party from sputtering from election to election.
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| Don't mind them, Steve. You'll always have this moment. |
Unfortunately for them, post-Compton Flambeau is not a world
that aims to make sense. It is a frigging Twilight Zone. And to fix that, prime
ministerials like Richard and Chas are going to need something that the Golden
Age Flambeau had. A third member of the triumvirate. A person to grow the party
and hold it together as the other two go off to war.
Every lever needs an fulcrum.
Compton and Mallet had Giraudy. Who could Chas and Frederick
turn to? Who will co-operate with them, without pandering and being a patsy?
Who will share power without competing against them for supremacy?
Who is it
that loves Flambeau more than power? There is no better candidate in the recent
past than the man who made himself the enemy of every independent duke, lord
and count of Flambeau in the last election campaign. The real Cardinal
Richelieu. The midwife of a new Flambeau organization. Clem Bobb.
This is going to be impossible. For all the potential
benefits, you can probably bet money that this will NEVER HAPPEN.
