Internal party politics, as Dame Jennifer Smith, Dr. Grant Gibbons and Alex Scott will readily attest, can be much more brutal than anything that happens between political parties.

Wayne Furbert learned that lesson yesterday when his party colleagues decided he was not the man to lead them and forced him to resign.

It would have been easy for him to decide to sulk in his tent or to walk out of the party altogether. The fact that he did not and has effectively pledged himself to work for whoever the new leader helps to explain why he became leader in the first place.

Mr. Furbert is dedicated, loyal and sincere in his beliefs. It is almost impossible not to like him, and it may be that he was simply too nice for a job that demands a certain amount of ruthlessness in order, in today’s favourite political catch phrase, to get things done.

In the end, he never seemed to come up with a way to deal with the new political landscape after Dr. Ewart Brown overthrew Mr. Scott in the Progressive Labour Party, and that, along with reportedly poor internal polling results, caused his downfall.

There is some irony in the fact that Mr. Furbert’s polls, at least in this newspaper, finally started to improve just as his colleagues were getting their knives out.

To be sure, the last two sets of Royal Gazette <$>polls in November and January were held in the worst of conditions for the UBP, first, immediately after Dr. Brown was elected leader and then after former UBP MP Jamahl Simmons walked out and accused UBP members in his constituency of racism.

The polls conducted some ten days ago were held in more neutral conditions, and the numbers for the UBP and for Mr. Furbert improved at the same time that the PLP’s worsened, although Dr. Brown’s own approval and favourability ratings went up.

Although the ratings for Mr. Furbert and for the UBP were not great, they were at least better than they had been in months. But they were too little, too late and Mr. Furbert decided to step down. He did so gracefully and with his dignity intact, and it is likely that even PLP supporters will have felt sorry for him.

Now the new leader of the UBP — and it looks as if it will be Michael Dunkley — will have to move quickly to unite the Opposition and to forge it into a cohesive whole that is equipped to go into a General Election — which Dr. Brown must now be itching to call.

Whoever the new leader is will have to ensure that the UBP’s big guns — Maxwell Burgess, Dr. Grant Gibbons and now Wayne Furbert — are on the party’s front lines and are prepared to tackle the Government on the major issues of the day.

For the PLP, the politically smart thing to do is to sit back and let the UBP wound itself. However, one would imagine that if the UBP does select Mr. Dunkley, there will be a certain amount of not so quiet whispering that the UBP is showing its true colours by ousting a black leader and replacing him with a white one, in the same way that it criticised the appointment of Wayne Furbert as an attempt to put a black face on a white party.

Whoever is selected will have to demonstrate quickly that he is the best man for the job.

If Mr. Dunkley is elected, he will almost certainly find himself being labelled as an inheritor of white privilege and will have to show how he has done things his own way and is his own man. However, Mr. Dunkley has a record of confounding those who underestimate him, from his very first primary election until today. He will need that ability and more now.