People who may have led quite ordinary lives are often singled out for their particular accomplishments and qualities when they die. It’s human nature to want to recognise and elevate them in death. Sometimes such credit is overdue, and it is regrettable that their talents were not recognised in life. And sometimes they are hyperbole and will fade back into obscurity.

But there are people who genuinely earn their superlatives, and for whom the praise they receive is not hyperbole.

Sir John Swan was one of them. For Bermuda, he was a political giant, dominating the island during his record-setting 13-year tenure as Premier, and putting Bermuda on the global map in a way that none of his predecessors or successors have quite managed.

Unlike the medieval alchemists, Sir John was able to combine political nous, communication skills, administrative talent and approachability into electoral and political gold.

As David Burt, the current Premier, noted, he was the same person in the White House as he was at Cup Match, and that ability to move between different worlds was a critical part of his success.

But he also combined that with a vision for Bermuda that enabled its economy to boom in the 1980s and 1990s while also spreading the wealth in a way that had never happened before.

If anything, as Patrick Burgess alluded to in his magisterial obituary in yesterday’s newspaper, Sir John embodied the burgeoning Black middle class of that period; a group who were critical not only to his electoral victories, but also to Bermuda’s flourishing as a community from the inequities of racial segregation.

Sir John was indeed as comfortable in the bar of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club as he was at Warwick Workmen’s, but his true home was in the living rooms of the Black middle class, with the people who had broken through the racial barriers of segregated Bermuda and aspired to a better life than their parents had had while pursuing a better future for their children.

They made careers and built businesses, they built homes and apartments, and they educated their children and sent them to university, usually for the first time in their families.

Sir John, arguably Bermuda’s most successful Black businessman and entrepreneur of the time, manifested those aspirations, and he did it as a “small C” conservative who believed in free markets and equal competition, in stark contrast to his more socialist political opponents.

But he also recognised the role of government in righting past wrongs, and his early success as Premier was a result of the investments he made in fixing the island’s social problems. Then, as now, the island was struggling with inflation and a high cost of living, and Sir John spearheaded the drive to build more housing and to improve the island’s safety net.

These measures were anathema to some of Sir John’s more right wing colleagues, but his proven ability to win elections gave him the political capital to set the direction of his party and the island. In doing so, he laid the foundations for much of Bermuda’s subsequent economic success.

He was not perfect. Like all people, he had flaws. But he was undoubtedly a man of his moment, and remained an important figure in Bermuda life long after he left office in his mid-60s.

Like the best politicians and business leaders, he could be ruthless. His decisions to call snap elections in 1983 and 1985 gave the United Bermuda Party — which looked like it was on its way out before he became leader — a new lease on life and also divided the Progressive Labour Party, setting it back for more than a decade from power.

In doing so, Sir John, perhaps inadvertently, also forced the PLP to move to the centre and to abandon some of its more extreme positions. In doing so, it laid the ground for its subsequent electoral successes, starting in 1998. The PLP may owe Sir John a bigger debt than it would care to acknowledge.

Ironically, it continues to thrive while the UBP is consigned to the history books. No one would have predicted that in 1985 when the reverse looked more likely.

One of the challenges in assessing Sir John’s legacy lies in the latter stages of his premiership. While Sir John had been quietly advocating Independence for some time in office, his decision to pursue an independence referendum in 1995 was also driven by a desire to upend an electoral calculus which he could see was moving away from the UBP and towards the PLP.

Achieving independence could have reversed that trend. But, for once, he was unable to bring his own party with him, and that, coupled with the late Frederick Wade’s bold decision to have the PLP boycott the vote, smashed the idea for at least a generation and Sir John’s premiership with it.

The subsequent and grubby McDonald’s controversy further laid bare the divisions within the UBP and removed any chance of it remaining in power ― the reverse of Sir John’s intentions in 1995. Nor could the UBP find another leader who could synthesise that same electoral magic that was a symbol of Sir John’s early years.

Those later failures should not take away from SIr John’s very real successes. His deft combining of rewarding aspiration and while exhibiting a social conscience is the same model that subsequent leaders have used with varying degrees of success.

His economic leadership, and in particular, his achievement of the tax treaty with the US, formed the bedrock of Bermuda’s success as a financial centre and in particular as a key global market for re/insurance. It is very difficult to imagine where Bermuda would be today without it, or Sir John.

His moves to slow down the inevitable closure of the US bases were also an example of superb defensive diplomacy. It bought the island time to manage the transition and to mitigate the very real economic harm that the closures portended.

Sir John’s life after politics and as a businessman would have justified its own obituary. Seon Place on Front Street will be a monument to his achievements for decades to come, but the construction of the Atlantis residential building may have a more lasting impact; it is the blueprint for building higher in Hamilton, and turning it into a city that lives by night as well as by day.

Sir John will no doubt have been frustrated that his dream of converting the Hamilton waterfront into something similar to the South Street seaport was never realised. Finally achieving that would be the best possible monument to his life.

For now though, it is a time to offer condolences to Sir John’s family and to remember his remarkable achievements. It is not hyperbole to say that we will not see his like again.