TOURISM Minister Ren?e Webb has been hoping to encourage more wealthy, upscale visitors, and at least on Friday, May 14, she will get her wish.

A boatload of wealthy American visitors will disembark on Front Street from the luxury cruise ship and she may notice a modest tectonic tilt to the right. For these visitors will arrive in Bermuda on the cruise, in the company of such conservative titans as William F.Buckley, Jr., William Bennett, and Richard Perle.

Ms Webb may not endorse their politics, but Front Street shops may never see such a concentrated proffering of Gold and Platinum cards.

The readers of the will comfortably fit in the top five per cent demographic sought by Tourism, and probably well within the top one per cent.

"Join us for seven sunny days and cool conservative nights aboard Radisson Seven Seas Cruises' stunning " implores the advert in the .

"This is a fantastic opportunity to discuss the key issues of today (and of our lifetime!) with America's foremost policy leaders, analysts, and decision-makers! Picture yourself, over seven glorious days, getting an authoritative look at US security measures directly from Richard Perle and former CIA chief James Woolsey, or getting an accurate take on U.S relations from Radek Sikorski, and the new editor of the NJohn O'Sullivan, or hearing Bill Bennett on gay marriage and other fires."

The readers of the will be in little doubt on which side of gay marriage and other cultural struggles Mr. Bennett will be found. The cruisers will not have to worry about spirited political debates, because all of the celebrity speakers are conservative, neo-conservative or ultra-conservative. They are certainly not lightweights in the US political arena. They are regular visitors on the televised political talk shows and contributors to op-ed pages.

William F.Buckley, Jr. is the sixth of ten children of an oilman who championed conservative causes and raised his family to do likewise. Buckley, now 73, will not have disappointed his father. After graduating from Yale in 1950, and gaining early notoriety with his best-selling , he founded in 1955 to provide a forum for conservative views.

He was host of the PBS programme , which gave him an opportunity to advance conservative opinions and impress with his wit and eloquence. His book describes a transatlantic crossing in the 70s, during which he visited Bermuda.

Buckley is liked even by liberals, because he is urbane and amusing, but the same cannot be said for William Bennett. As Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, he excoriated schools and students for failing to set and meet high standards. As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use.

Joshua Green, in the wrote that "Democrats in particular object to his partisan sermonising, which portrays liberals as inherently less moral than conservatives, more given to excusing personal weaknesses, and unwilling to confront the vices that destroy families." Mr. Bennett wrote the best-selling .

Unfortunately for Mr. Bennett, the recent revelation of a serious gambling problem, which cost him $500,000 in one Las Vegas weekend, led to him being dubbed "The Bookie of Virtue".

Known inside the Washington Beltway as "The Prince of Darkness", Richard Perle is the ubiquitous face of neo-conservatism. He has been associated with right-wing "think-tanks" and policy lobbyists like the American Enterprise Institute and the Project of the New American Century, both considered prominent architects of Bush's foreign policy, and in particular the war on Iraq.

Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, had to resign that position following charges that he had profited from a company involved in Defence contracts.

In 1996, Mr. Perle and Douglas Feith, now UnderSecretary of Defence for policy, were part of a team which produced a paper, issued by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a conservative Israeli think-tank, which declared that "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" was an "important Israeli strategic objective in its own right as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions".

Until recent reverses, Mr. Bush accepted Perle's pre-war view that the United Nations should have no role in Iraq.

Radek Sikorski is a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute who graduated from Oxford while a political refugee from Poland in the 80s. He was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola, and burnished his conservative credentials as a roving correspondent for NR, and by acting as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. representative in Poland after the demise of Communism. He was Poland's deputy minister of foreign affairs from 1999-2002.

Former CIA director James Woolsey, a very frequent political commentator on CNN and the political talk circuit, does not display strong ideological preferences, and has been viewed as such an able pragmatist that he has had the distinction of working for Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton.

The cruise will not be all talk and no play. Thereports that "hundreds of fellow fans have already reserved their luxury staterooms for this special sojourn of conservative revelry (three receptions and two late-night 'smokers' featuring H. Upmann cigars are in store!) Fascinating discussions of politics, policy, and current events (six seminars are planned!), intimate dining with our speakers, all while you luxuriate in the beauty of Bermuda and the renowned service and cuisine offered by Radisson and the unrivalled . Hey, that's not a , that's a once-in-a-lifetime experience."