By now many (including me) anticipated being in the election period, mostly because it was clear that the PLP were trying to get their candidates in place and were making grand pronouncements about the massive victory they anticipated under Dr. Brown.
The first apparent hiccup to the calling of an election appeared to be the internal battle taking place in the PLP between Dr. Brown and the branches with respects to candidate selection.
And then, with the BHC police report leak, everything changed, and Bermuda has spent the past month trying to process a massive scandal with Dr. Brown as a central player as well as other existing and past Cabinet Members and PLP MPs.
In light of everything that has gone on in the past 4 weeks or so, I'm going to put a question out to my readers:
When do you think Dr. Brown will want to go to an election, and why? (Email me here)
My sense is that there is a very strong possibility that Dr. Brown will - despite the scandal and his huge trust problem - very likely go in the next few weeks, for a late July or early August election.
Why do I say this? Well, ultimately I think that it comes down to the decision of the Privy Council over the media gag order.
The odds seem very much in the favour of the gag order being rejected by the Privy Council, as it was by the Chief Justice and the Court of Appeals.
If that's the case, once the gag order is lifted the revelations will start coming again in probably September/October which would mean that the BHC scandal will restart at that time, making a December election (assuming that Dr. Brown wants the students back, a group he has invested very heavily in courting) extremely tough.
I imagine there's some polling to be done to see just how much damage the Premier and his party have incurred over the past 4 weeks and if that has translated into support for the UBP, but ultimately Dr. Brown will bite the bullet and roll the dice of a campaign with a media gagged than one without (which was what the whole legal challenge has been about - buttoning up the media during an election).
Which leads me to think that with Parliament adjourning on Friday until November - an adjournment that occurred a week earlier than originally indicated after the Premier has done his best to avoid Parliament for the duration of the BHC Police Report legal battle - the odds are in favour of an election being called in the next couple of weeks.
I also think that the recent locking down of the PLP blogs, to quieten the voices of dissent in the comments and create the current mutual admiration society, is indicative of the closing of ranks and very tight message management needed during a campaign.
I'm very interested in your theories and rationales. I'll anonymously publish the ones I think most interesting and then take a stab at what the PLP and UBP's campaigns could look like, which I'll also be inviting readers theories on.
Posted by Christian S. Dunleavy