One Bermuda Alliance members will vote for a new leadership team at their annual conference tomorrow, with deputy leader Ben Smith taking on Robert King.

While this vote is for the leadership of the party and the right to take on the official title of Leader of the Opposition, the stakes are higher — the eventual winner will also need to cast himself as a potential Premier of Bermuda.

This is not a position that the past two holders of the job were able to realistically claim before the General Election in February. With only six seats after the 2020 election, neither Cole Simons nor Jarion Richardson could convincingly argue the OBA was likely to form the next government. Their job was to rebuild the party, and how successful they were can be measured by the additional seats the party won this year.

However, with 11 seats now in hand, the OBA can legitimately say it can and should target power in the next General Election. This is made more likely because whoever wins this race may have to face proven election winner David Burt for only about a year, provided he keeps his promise to step down at the Progressive Labour Party’s annual conference in October 2026.

Whoever succeeds Mr Burt as premier has big shoes to fill, and this provides an opportunity for the new leader of the OBA to take on a relatively untried opponent.

Even if Mr Burt opts to stay, the new Opposition leader must still establish the OBA as a viable government-in-waiting.

That’s because the OBA is already halfway to election success. In the last election, a majority of voters showed they were willing to vote against the PLP. But the fragmented field, and the need for a clearer vision and set of policies from the OBA, meant they were unwilling to support the Opposition, which also remains hampered by its United Bermuda Party legacy, and which the PLP has been highly effective in demonising.

So the successful candidate must have strong principles and a deep sense of what the OBA’s core values are. From there, he must be able to translate these into concrete policies that can give voters a compelling reason to vote for the OBA.

He also needs to put some distance between the OBA and its legacy, without abandoning the positive principles that the UBP and the OBA share.

What should these principles be?

They should start with a commitment to high standards in public office, a desire to bring the community together while celebrating its diversity, a belief in the importance of business, especially small business as an economic engine and means of people realising their dreams, and a commitment to making Bermuda a fairer place for all where no one is denied the opportunity to succeed.

There are, of course, other issues that need to be dealt with, including education, health and crime, but these should draw from the party’s core beliefs.

Opposition parties must walk a tightrope — they need to criticise the government of the day, and in doing so they need to say what they would do differently. But as an organisation whose primary goal is to gain power, they need to be careful not to unveil all of their policy ideas too early because that gives the Government the opportunity to either undermine those ideas or steal them.

So both candidates need to take some care not to show their entire hand at this point. But they need to explain enough of what they want to do to convince the party membership to support them.

This comes to the second point. Successful political leaders must be able to develop policies that reflect their values, be sound administrators, and they must possess the ability to communicate their ideas and message to the public.

This is easier said than done. Few politicians combine all of these skills, even among world leaders. The candidate who has that combination of skills — or the capacity to further develop them — is the person who should become leader.

These skills will be needed to continue to eradicate the perception that the OBA Is a front organisation for entrenched White interests. Accomplishing this is essential if the OBA wants to be a viable government-in-waiting that has united a fractured opposition.

While the OBA should offer opportunities to all to lead regardless of gender or ethnicity, the list of candidates running for leadership positions shows it still has work to do to be genuinely representative of Bermuda as a whole.

While two Black men are running for leader, all but one of the candidates for the other posts are White, and just one is a woman. Whether this was accidental or not — and the party’s parliamentary group is in fact predominantly Black — this sends the wrong message in 2025.

The new leader will have to double down on ensuring its leadership better reflects the island’s population — without falling into the trap of identity politics,. Otherwise, its commitment to integration and the need for the races to work together looks only skin-deep.

What is inarguable is that Bermuda needs a strong opposition that will fearlessly take on the Government and hold it accountable. That’s because democracy works only when this critical element is in place.

The voters made clear in February that they did not want a repeat of the PLP’s enormous 2020 majority. The OBA’s new leader needs to carry out their wishes for a stronger opposition.