A UBP supporter told me, some time before the last election, that it would be a mistake for his party to criticise the PLP too severely for its role in the Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal.

The electorate, he said, had taken in the main point ? that the Government had been looking the other way when unscrupulous people used the organisation as a cash cow. Swing voters knew that, he said, and it would weigh against the PLP at voting time.

But if the UBP tried to rub it in too hard, he said, the electorate would feel it was an attack against black people, and support would swing back towards the PLP.

That?s the sort of calculation that politicians make at election time, one which seems to involve a change of calculators. They put their plain vanilla, How-To-Be-a-Good-MP machine onto the shelf, and from their inside pockets, take out something with longer antennae ? the How-To-Get-Votes machine.

With this device, they make down-and-dirty calculations about what must be done and what needn?t be done. Its tottings-up have them making promises about intentions, and improvements, and favourable decisions to come? many of which no one in his right mind would believe, except at election time, when everybody?s tolerance for craziness goes up a dozen notches.

So when I hear these notions that are being bandied about at the moment about the BHC affair, I start to think we must be close to an election. The Premier and his Cabinet really don?t know much about the details? Boy, that?s some crazy stuff!

They?re somehow under the impression that it?s OK for politicians to be unethical, just as long as they don?t stray into criminal territory? That?s crazy, too! It would undermine the rule of law if a politician were to be fired for behaving unethically? Well, if I hadn?t seen that one with my own eyes, I wouldn?t have believed anyone would have had the nerve to suggest it.

No matter who you are, or what the crisis is, the same five principles, more or less, are involved in dealing with it.

1.Collect all the information you can about the problem.

2.Decide who or what is put at risk by it.

3.Make a plan to deal with those risks.

4.Make sure everyone in the loop is singing from the same sheet.

5.Establish a procedure for reviewing your plan in the light of new information.

The Cabinet is the senior decision-making body in Bermuda. It would be foolish to suggest that they are anything but highly practised in this technique.

The BHC scandal played out in two installments. Opposition MP Michael Dunkley made some allegations in the House. The Mid-Ocean News followed that up, early in March, with stories suggesting that contractors were being paid much too much money for the work they were doing.

At first, the stories looked as if they might relate simply to wrong-doing by members of BHC?s staff. There were rumours that politicians were involved, perhaps, but rumours are only rumours.

In the wake of that first part of the story, the then-Premier, Jennifer Smith, asked the Auditor General to investigate and make a report. The Board of the BHC suspended the organisation?s director, Raymonde Dill, and its financial officer. A short time later, the Auditor, as a result of what he found, called the Police.

When the Auditor General?s report arrived on her desk in May, Ms Smith told the public that she had sent it back to him, unread, because the Police were involved.

Early in September, the second wave of the story hit. Mr. Dill made a series of allegations to the Bermuda Sun that politicians had been involved in irregularities at the BHC, including the then-Minister, Nelson Bascome.

Mr. Dill alleged that Mr. Bascome had ordered him to bypass normal tendering procedure in awarding a $300,000 contract to Island Construction, which is owned by PLP supporter Zane DeSilva.

Mr. Dill made other allegations about Minister Ewart Brown and former Minister Arthur Hodgson.

In a statement to the press, the Premier said she had summoned all Ministers to a special Cabinet meeting to discuss the allegations the very day they were published.

She was going to talk to Dr. Brown and Mr. Bascome when they returned to Bermuda. On October 2, Dr. Brown was quoted as having said that, although he and the Premier had not met in a one-on-one session, the whole matter had been discussed at a regular Cabinet meeting the week before.

On October 8, the Premier dismissed Mr. Bascome and replaced him with Col. David Burch. The point of relating these facts is to point out how clearly they show that the Cabinet was doing what it should have been doing ? managing the BHC problem as a crisis.

The risks involved were at the highest kind of level ? jail time for some elected officials, perhaps even the downfall of the Government. Jennifer Smith is no fool. She might have made a public display of handing the Auditor General?s report back to him, but you can take it as read that one way or another, every single fact it contained would have been known to her.

She would have gone over those facts in detail with her Cabinet, together with any other information that the machinery of Government might have been able to throw up.

That process would have continued from then until now, and it would be absurd to think that that the current Premier and his Cabinet are not still managing the crisis, as need arises, to this day. It seems obvious that most recently, the new Premier and his Cabinet colleagues have been consulting those machines of theirs, the ones with the long antennae, and calculate that they stand a chance of being able to draw a line under the BHC scandal as it presently rests.

The Police investigation can be taken no further. One ex-member of BHC staff has been charged with fraud and two others fired. A Minister has been dismissed (albeit no one has ever admitted that was as a result of this particular scandal). The Cabinet thinks the public will buy this as a satisfactory outcome.

The Premier fired the first shot of his sales campaign a few days ago, congratulating everyone involved in the investigation for behaving marvellously, promising that the law would be changed to catch the crooks next time, but asking the public, this time, to forgive and forget.

We?ve got ?other pressing issues? to face, of course. And when he?d finished his pitch, the usual cast of PLP cherubim chimed in with a rousing chorus of Amens.

Are we going to buy it? Not me, and I hope no one else does, either. This isn?t about one man committing fraud and a couple of others getting slapped for not having noticed.

It isn?t, as my UBP friend was afraid people would think, about criticising black people. This is a bread and butter thing. It is about the systematic looting of, probably, millions of tax dollars that belong to you, to me and to all the families next door.

Those at fault are cynical manipulators whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have been smart enough not to leave their fingerprints behind. I don?t know who they are any better than anyone else, but we all know the money has gone.

All of us have seen signs that there is an it?s-my-turn-to-get-rich mentality at work in the corridors of power. It?s as addictive as heroin, and just as destructive. If Alex Scott and his Cabinet are smart, they?ll use the BHC scandal to make the point, as forcefully as they can, that dishonesty is not acceptable on their watch. Otherwise, those people who think it?s their turn to get rich are going to make this Government?s time in office just one long assembly line of BHC scandals, one after the other after the other.

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