A recent wave of written efforts by supporters of Premier Dr. Ewart Brown to shore up his position may have the opposite effect – because they suggest that his position is weaker than may have been supposed. An opinion piece from PLP chairman David Burt, trying to reject the notion that Dr. Brown is elitist, was followed in short order by one from Works Minister Derrick Burgess which tried to defuse the feeling that the current administration is anti-labour.

In a soon to be published interview with new Sen. Mark Bean, he also counters the arrogance claims that have been levelled towards Dr. Brown.

The Mid-Ocean News' readers have also been treated to a series of articles from former MP Julian Hall, which essentially try to warn people off from challenging Dr. Brown. All of this comes as Dr. Brown has endured a very bad couple of months of politics, much of it of his own making.

It marks a heavy comedown from December, when Dr. Brown won the general election and, against many expectations, maintained the Progressive Labour Party's parliamentary majority and increased the PLP's share of the vote. Then, there was speculation about whether the United Bermuda Party would survive as a political entity, not whether Dr. Brown would survive as Premier.

Two events bookend Dr. Brown's problems and go some way towards explaining his current unpopularity. One was the bullying of Speaker of the House of Assembly Stanley Lowe in an attempt to get him to stop the Government having to answer questions about Ministerial travel. The second concerns the handling of redundancies in the Department of Tourism's New York office. Those redundancies have now been halted, at least temporarily, by the courts.

The reason the court issued the injunction was because the Government had apparently failed to consult with the employees and their union before deciding to eliminate the jobs; a breach of their employment contract.

The two incidents seem to sum up Dr. Brown's management style; it's his way or the highway, with little regard for law, due process or the rights of employees. Sen. Bean and others may protest that Dr. Brown is not arrogant, but simply results-driven, but the fact is that there are processes and contracts in place for good reasons, and the fact they do not suit is not enough reason to throw them over.

What is also interesting is not that there are people coming to Dr. Brown's defence, but who they are, and how few they are. Mr. Burgess is a long-time supporter of Dr. Brown, but the fact that a former president of the Bermuda Industrial Union is having to assert his pro-labour credentials speaks volumes.

Sen. Bean is a recent appointee to the Senate whose political future lies entirely in the hands of Dr. Brown. Mr. Burt is the chairman of the party which Dr. Brown leads. Where are the senior Cabinet Ministers? Where are the MPs who supported Dr. Brown's challenge of Alex Scott just two years ago? It can be argued that leadership style does not matter, or at least matters less than results.

But the results are not much to get excited about either. Economic growth is slowing down, crime rates refuse to fall and two of the big ideas from the PLP's election campaign, free child care and free public transport, are being executed, but in a heavily diluted and possibly discriminatory form. As for Dr. Brown's own Ministries, tourism's "platinum period" has a distinctly tinny feel. Time and again, the Premier has used his record in tourism to demonstrate how capable he is. Now that tourism arrivals seem to be falling, that record looks increasingly hollow but civil servants are turned into scapegoats.

The Government's legal defeat on the New York redundancies is also telling. Virtually every union, with the possible exception of the BIU, has been alienated from the Government, almost always because of lack of consultation, or a refusal by Government to abide by the rules and previous agreements. This might not matter if Dr. Brown was broadly popular, but he is not, and probably never will be, because of the divisive approach he takes to politics. The alienation of the labour base of the party should be of concern to the PLP's leadership, because there are few other places it can turn for support.

What was interesting about the opinion survey published earlier this month in this newspaper was not Dr. Brown's own unpopularity, but the fact that it does not seem to have affected overall support for the PLP. What this suggests is that unlike, say, Tony Blair when he was leader of the British Labour Party, or Sir John Swan when he was leader of the UBP, is that Dr. Brown does not add support to the PLP, which remains popular in spite of him. That begs the question of just where the party would be if it had someone else as leader who was eager to bring people together rather than keep them apart.