HEN in doubt, Raymond Chandler once mused about losing the narrative thread of one of his hard-boiled stories, have a man come into a room holding a gun. But when Bermuda's Government lose the plot they opt to send "The Man" into a press conference armed with the ingredients for a distracting, freak show-style spectacle.

By the time the Premier has finished raging and leering and babbling in , the issues ostensibly under discussion have been entirely eclipsed. And a bemused public is left none the wiser about Government objectives or intentions.

But then that's the whole point of these flamboyant exercises in deception, isn't it? Calculated to distract public attention from the issues of the day rather than illuminate them, last week's exercise in comprehensive obfuscation was a case in point.

On Thursday what was billed as an across-the-board retrospective of the Government's 2005 agenda and a curtain-raiser for its new year programme was convened at the Cabinet Office. A question-and-answer session to be led by the Premier and touching on all aspects of Government policy, it was tacitly implied the entire Cabinet would meet the press.

But in the event none of the Cabinet Ministers whose portfolios were being discussed bothered to attend. They must have better survival instincts than to associate themselves with a Premier whose every public utterance these days seems to be part of a political suicide note that's being delivered in installments

The Premier only had the Works Minister dancing attendance on him ? and both men, of course, gyrated wildly around anything even remotely approximating a direct answer to a direct question.

The double-act of Scott & Burch, the Fork-Tongued Master of Mendacity and The Human Porcupine, proceeded to engage in the type of low-brow theatrics more commonly associated with sleazy carnival midways than the corridors of power.

Having developed a resistance to shame that even those US Congressmen on Jack Abramoff's payroll might envy, the pair had nothing new to report on the Berkeley Institute's completion date (the Unfinished School may yet end up bookending the Unfinished Church as a local curiosity that draws rubber-necking tourists ? assuming, of course, there are still any visitors coming here to gawk). Nothing new on a Social Agenda that remains a vapid catch-phrase rather than a plan of action to address ongoing socio-economic and cultural convulsions that now register on the Richter Scale. Nothing new or noteworthy emerged at all except for the Premier's renewed onslaught against the Salvation Army.

The Premier is an inveterate muck-raker rather than the spin doctor he so often presents himself as. Presumably the mud he is even now frantically volleying at the Salvation Army is intended to sully its reputation preparatory to Government cancelling its grant for social welfare programmes. If and when that allotment is transferred to another service, don't be surprised if it just happens to be a for-profit enterprise run by one of his Parliamentary colleagues.

A master of selective outrage, the Premier counterfeited indignation that the $700,000 Salvation Army grant was somehow being abused by the organisation. There were characteristically sinister insinuations of fiscal malfeasance, hints the money was being indirectly channelled to Army headquarters in Canada rather than being spent on those who so desperately need it here.

But facts, as per usual, were conspicuous by their complete absence from his tirade. And this Premier, of course, only has about as much credibility when it comes to lecturing on financial wrongdoing as Dick Cheney does on conflicted interests.

Clearly the Premier's new-found concern with the above-board management of public funds does not extend to investigating the culture of corruption Bermuda's Auditor General has long since identified as existing within his own Government. There has not been a single outraged word from the Premier about the non-existent standards which resulted in $8 million of Bermuda Housing Corporation funds being written off without a single missing penny being reclaimed. Nary one incensed peep from "The Man" about the negligence that allowed the Berkeley Institute budget to balloon from $71 million to more than $120 million (his efforts there were instead focused on shifting blame for the debacle to that most hapless of sacrificial victims, Ashfield DeVent, whose political career was forfeited to save the Premier's face). And, of course, there has yet to be any breast beating or gnashing of P.'s teeth about the frankly obscene terms of the Coco Reef lease ? widely perceived to be political payback to Progressive Labour Party crony John Jefferis that has been charged to the taxpayers' account.

With a 109-year history of providing services that Bermuda's civic authorities have either been slow ? or entirely negligent ? in introducing, the Salvation Army has a sterling reputation in the community. The Premier's fulminating, as embarrassing as it was wildly inaccurate, is unlikely to alter that fact.

But his outburst was nevertheless instructive. It provided a memorable textbook example of the blitzkrieg smear offences this Premier so often engages in to further his short-term ends. Select a target (even one as beyond reproach as the Army) then marshal cant, invective and hearsay and send them into combat in a pre-emptive and entirely unexpected attack.

If you can judge most people by the company they keep, you can certainly gauge this Premier's character by the adversaries he has chosen over the years. The Salvation Army can draw some small measure of consolation from the fact it now joins an Enemies List that has, at various times, included everyone from conservationists to policemen to Governors to Bermuda Regiment Commanding Officers.

All of them have featured as unlikely supporting players in the Premier's grotesque political fantasies, fantasies he introduces to the public debate to justify preconceived resolutions to do injury to the reputation of some individual or institution. An industrious and inventive conspiracy theorist, he routinely casts real people in these paranoid psycho-dramas if he believes political profit will accrue.

But it's doubtful these shock tactics have ever really been as effective as he believes. Intended to galvanise the PLP support base, to act as a binding, vote-winning and nation-building force by compelling black voters to come together to repel the diabolical, largely white cabals he detects operating in the shadows of public life, most Bermudians have grown nonchalant about his calculated hysteria and fear-mongering. The self-styled slayer of dragons is increasingly viewed as a fantasist with a bad attitude if his poll numbers, now plumbing abyssal depths, are to be believed.

The Salvation Army must not succumb to what must be an almost overpowering instinct to retreat from the issue at hand ? the future of its Government grant ? and launch a rearguard action to defend its integrity. It's entirely unnecessary. The Army's reputation speaks for itself. So, too, does the Premier's.

He is a one-trick political pony as is routinely demonstrated by his insistence on sowing the seeds of mistrust and mutual suspicion between Bermuda's racial blocs.

This is his only political stratagem, his perpetual fall-back position. Good governance, the competent administration of Bermuda's affairs, these are of little consequence. Only the acquisition and consolidation of political power interests him. But the forays into race-based demagoguery, the frantic evasive action he engages in when challenged with incontrovertible facts, the utter lack of concern with either accountability or integrity in public life, all of these factors are now actually militating against a third successive PLP term.

The Premier's antics have eroded his Government's credibility and electability as surely as they have his own. Frederick Wade finally positioned the Progressive Labour Party for electoral victory in the 1990s by forcibly moving the party in a centrist direction and capturing a middle-ground of voters who were thoroughly disillusioned with a corrupt and complaisant United Bermuda Party. It was a sure-fire recipe for victory. The imperious Jennifer Smith veered the PLP not so much in a leftist direction as an absolutist one. Now the incumbent Premier is taking the governing party into the Twilight Zone. The electorate, rightly, is increasingly alarmed about a Government entirely lacking in energy, direction or principle; the international business sector, now the lone pillar of Bermuda's economy, is petrified.

Based on the plentiful evidence to hand, it's perhaps reasonable to conclude that along with the plot this Premier has lost whatever political wits he once possessed.