IN a story that suggests that US politics can be stranger than fiction, the current issue of The Village Voice, a New York-based weekly generally considered to have a left-of-centre political bias, reports that a Republican political operative who worked for the United Bermuda Party in last July's General Election is now working for the Presidential campaign of the Reverend Al Sharpton.

"Roger Stone, the long-time Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush President in 2000, is financing, staffing and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton," reported Wayne Barrett of the Voice.

While it is not unheard of for US political advisers of various types to work across the political divide, it is very unusual. Consultants, strategists, fund-raisers and pollsters tend to be closely and reliably identified with Republican or Democratic candidates, a situation that owes as much to good business sense and perceptions of trustworthiness than to ideological rigidity.

Within these parameters, it is hard to imagine a more unlikely political alliance than that between Sharpton, who would normally be placed on the liberal wing of the Democratic party, and Stone, "a consultant who's worked in every GOP (Republican) presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns."

The thrust of Barrett's comprehensive and detailed report is that Stone may still be working for Republican interests, and that Sharpton appears to be a distinctly unusual Democrat, with a personal agenda which may place him at odds with the Democratic National Committee. "Asked if he had ever been involved in a Democratic campaign before, Stone cited his 1981 support of (New York mayoral candidate) Ed Koch, though he was quoted at the time as saying he only did it because Koch was also given the Republican ballot line.

"Stone played a pivotal role in in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior campaigns.

"He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use (Stone's) credit card to cover thousands in NAN costs ? neither of which he could do legally for the campaign. Stone confirmed his matching-fund and staffing roles, but refused to comment on the NAN subsidies.

"Sharpton denounced the Voice's inquiries as 'phony liberal paternalism', insisting that he'd 'talk to anyone I want' and likening his use of Stone to Bill Clinton's reliance on pollster Dick Morris, saying he was 'sick of these racist double standards'. He did not dispute that Stone had helped generate matching contributions and staff the campaign. Asked about the Stone loans, he conceded that he 'asked him to help with NAN.'

"While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took centre stage at a debate, confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the New York Times that he 'helped set the tone and direction' of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research.

Before Halloran became involved with the Sharpton campaign, "he was busy anyway with another Stone-arranged assignment ? running the parliamentary campaign for the United Bermuda Party, ironically the white-led party seeking to unseat the island's first black government. Halloran had also managed a Stone-run campaign in New York in 2002, spending nearly $65 million of billionaire Tom Golisano's money and getting the Independence Party candidate a mere 14 per cent of the vote in the gubernatorial race.

"Stone, whose firm represented the prior Bermuda Government, did initial work in the 2003 race there and left, recommending Halloran. Sharpton says that when the Bermuda job was over in September, he hired Halloran to work under Frank Watkins, who ran both of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, but when he discovered that Jackson and Watkins were 'sabotaging my campaign' and were really with Howard Dean, he replaced Watkins with Halloran.

"By his own account, Halloran made so much money in the Golisano and Bermuda campaigns, he has so far worked for Sharpton since September 4 without receiving a single cent in pay."

Opposition Leader Dr. Grant Gibbons disagreed with a number of the references to the UBP and to the protagonists in the Voice story.

"I was aware that Charles Halloran had gone on to work for the Rev. Sharpton's campaign, but in a different capacity than he worked for us. There are a number of exaggerations in the story. Roger Stone worked as a political consultant to Sir John Swan in one of the elections back in the Eighties, and as far as I know, he had no contact with the UBP after that.

"About a year before the 2003 election, we had some exploratory discussions with Roger Stone, as we did with a number of political consultants, but we came to a mutual conclusion that we were not a good fit, and we went our separate ways.

"Charles Halloran did work for us as a political consultant in the 2003 election, but not in the capacity that he is working for the Rev. Sharpton, as campaign manager. For us, he worked on ground operations and helped with branch organisation. He was not recommended to us by Stone.

"As far as I understand it, many political consultants will work for different candidates at different times. It is not quite as frequent that they will cross Democratic and Republican lines, but it certainly happens from time to time.

"Charles Halloran was helpful. It was the first time he had assisted the United Bermuda Party, in fact the first time he had been in Bermuda.

"We have no problem with Rev. Sharpton, and consultants work in campaigns for all sorts of reasons. I presume he was paid a lot by the Golisano campaign, because he was not paid excessively by us. We spent a lot less on the last campaign than we did on the previous one."