LONG before the Premier took a page - or actually the entire opening act - out of and began divining the future with the aid of a seer's crystal balls and tarot cards instead of the opinion polls and focus group surveys employed by the more mundane variety of political consultant, she could have been justly accused of occultism.

Strip away the supernatural associations and the word "occult" technically refers to knowledge that is kept secret, shared only among a small circle of initiates.

Although the word has long since been appropriated by pulp fictioneers, the media and the man on the street as an all-purpose term for magic and mysticism, its original meaning was not freighted with any such shamanistic overtones.

In fact, the leadership of this Government practises "occultism" far more assiduously than socialism or most of the other clich?d political -isms it pays lip service to with the exception of the obsolete strategies and tactics contained in its iron-bound drillbook on racial nationalism.

Its eccentric zeal for hoarding information, for furtiveness, for deception - its unwavering adherence to the pernicious doctrine of secrecy - owes far more to the ritualised guile of a secret society than the precepts of open governance.

Information is disseminated on a need-to-know basis - and most of the time the Cabinet Office decides the public does not, in fact, need to know.

Given the Premier's taste in political advisers, it's not surprising to learn there is a longstanding link between devotees of nationalistic creeds of the type espoused by the PLP and the occult in its more mystical sense. These connections have been remarked upon more than once.

Firstly, closed, nationalistic cliques tend to hate the precepts of openness, accountability and public scrutiny and operate very much along the lines of secret cults. Both are rigidly hierarchical. Both engage in obscurantism. Both believe knowledge is a secret that will only be revealed to those adepts chosen by destiny to pull back the veils of the universe.

The fact that large sections of Alaska Hall's anti-democratic internal constitution remain wholly incompatible with the Bermuda Constitution's system of democratic checks and balances underscores this point; the PLP leadership is granted a type of unchallengeable divine right to rule that would have shamed a Mediaeval despot, is deemed to possess the kind of infallability any Pope would envy.

Secondly, those who engage in extremist nationalist politics and mysticism both build their temples on the same shifting-sands foundations of folkloric myths and legends. Myth rather than history, faith rather than reason, informs both the political and magical variety of superstitions. Like secular St. Augustines, supporters are expected to believe precisely because the tenets of this political creed are impossible.

So the leadership of the current Government is content to metaphorically plaster Bermuda with campaign posters in this General Election that simply depict the broad contours of racial nationalism: the fine detail of specifics, of actual policies and programmes, will be added later on an basis if they are re-elected.

It's an unhappy return to form for the PLP.

In this election, as in all others except the polished, mainstream and anodyne campaign it ran in 1998, the PLP is attempting to cast the ballot as a Manichean clash of absolutes - good versus evil or, in racial terms, black versus white.

While such a strategy may have had some immediacy in the 1960s, it actually never drew more than 40 per cent of the vote even at the height of Bermuda's fits-and-starts transformation from oligarchy to democracy. And in any event, the PLP's now shopworn brand of racial nationalism was and remains strictly a vote-winning mechanism, not a problem-solving formula.

Forty-odd years after the PLP embraced this singularly unadaptive creed, it remains geared towards the economic and social realities of Bermuda in the middle of the 20th century. It has little or no application in Bermuda on the threshold of a new millennium.

Today this is an island in which the traditional PLP class-racial enemy, tourism-dependent Front Street, has long since been supplanted by Reinsurance Row. If the term "40 Thieves" resonates at all with younger Bermudians, both black and white, it's as the name of a long-shuttered nightclub their parents reminisce about, not as the Mark of the Economic Beast. But it seems some Bermudian politicians are as apt as some generals to fight each new war using the last one's campaign book.

The PLP's two-word manifesto - "Emancipation", "Affirmation" - makes clear that the appeal to racial solidarity eclipses all other considerations in this election. The PLP leadership is hoping voters make an intuitive choice when they mark their ballot papers. In marked contrast, the United Bermuda Party is depending on voters making a logical choice between the two parties.

Frankly, with just a week to go before election day, a sane discussion of the relative merits and weaknesses of the two parties' positions on the major issues of the day - economic stewardship, public education, tamping down on violent crime - remains impossible. The governing party doesn't have any positions.

position on the possibility of Independence under a second PLP administration. On strengthening ties with Caricom and concurrently weakening traditional economic links with North America and Europe. On income tax. On Quixotic diplomatic initiatives like opening relations with Communist Cuba. On a public education system that would rightly be declared a disaster area if Point Finger Road was the epicentre of an earthquake rather than the ground zero of a man-made cataclysm. On a tourism industry that's vital signs are registering the flat lines of pending extinction, the Minister's insistence on embargoing plunging arrival figures entirely in keeping with the unwavering Cabinet Office policy of withholding damaging information.

The UBP has released position papers on everything, probably too many for the average voter to digest. It has mounted a slick, professional marketing campaign, one that presents the party as conciliatory, inclusive, business-friendly and more socially-conscious than has hitherto been the case.

If there were truth in advertising laws in Bermuda, the "new" UBP would likely face the risk of prosecution. There is, in fact, very little difference between the "new" UBP and the old version. The style might be more aggressively inclusive, more focused on high-consensus issues, but the substance is largely unchanged.

It's an all-things-to-all-men campaign, somewhat bloodless, somewhat dispassionate. Yet the UBP's live-and-let-liveism is being centrally co-ordinated; all of the candidates are reading from the same campaign script.

The PLP candidates are, in essence, running 36 individual campaigns, some through the media, some on the doorstep, and there is very little commonality between them.

At one extreme there is Dr. Ewart Brown, who speaks in softly persuasive sound-bites even when addressing a contentious issue like GPS, viewed as a Government-mandated shakedown by most taxi drivers and their supporters. Engaged in a high-intensity fire-fight with the taxi drivers, he is channelling his not inconsiderable personal charm through the media to try and dispel misgivings about this inititiative. His is a low-key but highly-visible campaign to reassure this key constituency that he does not intend to spike the taxi industry's milk with vinegar.

Then there is Dale Butler, in best citizen-politician mode, going door to door, selling himself to Government voters as a loyal party man, to waverers as a moderating influence on the more extremist elements in Government, to the traditional UBP voters who plumped for him in 1998 as a man whose principles transcend the restrictions of Bermudian party labels.

Both Dr. Brown and Mr. Butler have both mounted credible campaigns. But to an outsider looking in, the suggestion that both men were actually contesting this election under the same party umbrella would seem as weak as Chinese tea.

The "Premier In Hiding", as she has come to be known during this campaign, has remained characteristically conspicuous by her absence from the campaign trail.

Sequestered from the people she nominally leads, she is a woman who - when she speaks at all - does so in enigmatic (her only advice following the September 11 attacks, which came weeks after the defining moment in modern history, was to suggest Bermudians dig Victory Gardens).

She remains a Sphinx whose riddle cannot be solved by most Bermudians.Yet this reclusive, remote and essentially unknowable figure is also, on paper at least, the most powerful Premier in Bermuda's history, which makes her entirely hidden political agenda all the more troubling.

Having persuaded Britain, the island's disinterested absentee constitutional landlord, to sign off on a mechanism to amend the Bermuda Constitution based on voice votes in the House of Assembly, she has accrued to herself a degree of executive power never before known.

approving an Order in Council to redraw the Bermudian political map without requiring either all-party round-table talks or public ratification by way of a referendum, the British have weakened - perhaps critically - the keystone in the arch of Bermuda's previously checked and balanced Constitution.

So, for instance, the constitutionally-enshrined remit of the Auditor General could be altered by Parliament to either remove the incumbent or circumscribe his mandate, blocking any further investigative audits of those elected and appointed officials who abuse the public purse. Similarly, it is now probably technically feasible for the Premier to dissolve Bermuda's remaining constitutional ties to the UK based on a bare minimum of 19 raised voices in the House of Assembly.

With knowledge of her actual plans for a second term limited to a select few, with her ability to institute even the most revolutionary and far-reaching changes now effectively unfettered by the British, renewing her mandate would be to make Bermuda and Bermudians hostages to a most capricious fortune. It would be an affirmation of despotism, not liberation.

C.P. Snow once remarked that "the euphoria of secrecy goes to the head" And despite her storied taste for champagne, impenetrable secrecy clearly remains this Premier's preferred inebriant - one that may yet leave Bermuda with an industrial-strength hangover.