A CENTURY ago Bermuda's vacationer laureate Mark Twain wrote to a friend that among the island's chief appeals to jaded Americans like himself was the lack of anything resembling a professional political class, the careerist mediocrities who view holding public office as nothing more or less than a means to private graft.

In Bermuda Twain found "no politics, no money-getting frenzy . . . no Tammany (Hall-style corruption), no Republican Party, no Democratic Party, no graft, no office-seeking, no legislature for sale . . . The spirit of the place is serenity, repose, contentment, tranquillity". The serpent of wholesale corruption had yet to intrude on a paradise relatively free of political racketeering (although it should be borne in mind that Hamilton's Latin motto ? or "Hamilton Has Gathered The Scattered" ? has long been freely translated as "Get What You Can").

Modern Bermuda, which Twain would scarcely recognise if he were to re-visit the island today, is no longer a sanctuary from the pervasive political vices it was once literally and metaphorically islanded from. It is now a microcosm of the world around it, mirroring the same unsavoury customs and conventions that have resulted in politicians being almost universally regarded as sewer dwellers who routinely augment the filth they inhabit.

From ongoing boondoggling at the Berkeley Institute construction site to the sweetheart deal involving the lease for the publicly owned Stonington Beach Hotel, members of this Government have run amok in so unrestrained a manner they may well have awed the grizzled Tammany ward bosses of Twain's day.

For even those Victorian arch-schemers, who made a political art form out of embezzlement, would have been hard pressed to conceive of a situation quite like the Bermuda Housing Corporation plundering ? a situation in which the indiscriminate misappropriation of public funds has been deemed to be unethical instead of criminal.

Governmental codes of conduct are clearly as insubstantial as the paper they are printed on. Existing laws covering corruption are conveniently interpreted to be so archaic that all the Police Commissioner and Director of Public Prosecutions can do is issue public reprimands rather than arrest and charge any wrongdoers.

Is it any wonder some wags are suggesting the ideal flag to hoist over the Independent Bermuda now being surreptitiously planned by the same ethically-challenged PLP inner circle that engineered the BHC scandal is the Jolly Roger, the skull-and-crossbones emblazoned ensign once flown by pirates?

Cole Porter's has also been put forward as a post-Independence national anthem ("In olden times/A glimpse of stocking/Was looked on/As something shocking/Now, heaven knows/Anything goes . . ."). An increasingly frustrated and exasperated Bermudian public have reached the point where they believe Government MPs should have polygraph tests administered before even providing "Yes" or "No" answers to questions involving graft.

Corruption is to politicians what fleas are to dogs. It's a well-nigh unavoidable condition, just as employee theft and pilfering are occupational hazards faced by all entrepreneurs.

No one except the most crassly na?ve ? or wilfully blind ? would ever suggest graft suddenly came into being on a Progressive Labour Party Government's watch. But there are degrees involved. And clearly any divvying up of the spoils of office that took place under past administrations was relatively small-scale in nature.

Either that or the UBP was a far more clean-living institution than anyone had reason to believe when the electorate finally foreclosed on what was seen to be an increasingly squalid House That Jack Built in 1998. The reality is that any official paper trails linking former Governments to wholesale corruption would certainly have been fed to the media in the two years that have elapsed since the PLP's signature scandal, the prowling of the Bermuda Housing Corporation, was exposed. The fact none has been is telling, the Premier's characteristically free-floating and wholly unsubstantiated claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

Chief among the habit-forming political vices the present Government has acquired is an absolute disdain for accountability ? a failure to accept responsibility for any of the epically-proportioned wrongdoings that have occurred under its rule.

This ongoing denial is so total it amounts to a rejection of reality. Even the autocratic Yasser Arafat this week admitted to "mistakes" being made within the Palestinian Authority, a polite euphemism for the rampant graft that has bankrupted his regime financially and morally.

Canada, which boasts a political culture far similar to Bermuda's, one where governmental accountability is also the keystone in the arch of constitutionality, Prime Minister Paul Martin vigorously co-operated in the convening of independent commissions to hold public hearings into the myriad public sector scandals he inherited from predecessor Jean Chretien. Martin sacked Cabinet Ministers who grazed at the public trough, suspended civil servants implicated in the private redistribution of public funds and apologised unreservedly and repeatedly to an electorate that gave him the benefit of the doubt at July's national poll.

In the other world that is Bermuda, of course, the Premier ? despite having members of his Government branded as criminals by any other name by both the Police Commissioner and DPP ? cannot even bring himself to concede any abuses of power took place. His insulation from objective reality would appear to be so profound and so complete he must mentally inhabit a world of his own subjective making, one that bears only a passing resemblance to the one the rest of us live in.

The only statement he has thus far issued on the BHC scandal was incredible in the strictest sense of the word ? it simply could not be believed.

Instead of addressing the grave issue to hand, he resorted to denial, dissembling and diversionary tactics ? all among his favoured fall-back positions when confronted with bad news.

Combative, fulminating and raging to a degree that suggested he is the man who put the "rant" in frantic, the Premier made no reference to reclaiming public monies that were misappropriated.

He talked around the question of putting iron-clad controls into place to prevent a repetition of such frauds. And, of course, he would not even contemplate naming and shaming ? let alone firing ? any current members of his Cabinet implicated in the scandal.

Consequently, he has allowed the integrity of his entire administration to be eclipsed by the shadow of suspicion. As commentator Christian Dunleavy pointedly remarked, Cabinet Ministers serve at the pleasure of the Premier. So the only conclusion that can be drawn from the Premier's obstinate refusal to entertain the notion that there should be political consequences for the BHC skulduggery is that corruption pleases Alex Scott.

When stridency,and are stacked as very high as this, the end result is a work of contemporary art suitable for inclusion in the next Bermuda National Gallery Biennial. But as an act of contrition for the looting that took place at the BHC on his Government's, the Premier's towering mendacity is hardly likely to be accepted as mitigation by the electorate.

He neither answered to the public nor threw himself on its mercy as regards the BHC scandal. Instead, the Premier's hollow rhetoric amounted to a never-ending shaggy dog story, its tiresome narrative circumlocutions avoiding ? rather than arriving at ? any point. For a man with so little to say on the subject of responsibility and ethics, he manages to say it endlessly.

himself as an iron-toothed new broom, on being elevated to the Premiership after the post-election palace coup his first pledge was to introduce much-needed reform to a scandal-tainted Government. He set himself the Augean task of mucking out a Cabinet Office contaminated with filth that had accumulated during his predecessor's tenure. But this Premier has not in fact swept clean. Rather he has been assiduously sweeping as much official dirt as possible under a Cabinet Office carpet that must now be as very furrowed and uneven as his brow whenever he meets the Press.

Ultimately, this Premier has recklessly and completely squandered any moral authority restored to the office of Premier over the last year. In terms of providing the principled leadership he promised, by effectively condoning and conspiring to further cover-up the BHC outrage he is now the lamest of ducks.

Clearly Mark Twain's maxim about the dubious morals of American politics now also applies here ? they are not only food for laughter, they are in fact an entire banquet.