A compromise minister appointed by a compromise Premier is how some harsh observers have judged the short but decidedly unsweet Government career of Ashfield DeVent.

Swept into parliament in a November 2002 by-election, Mr. DeVent, who was lauded as bringing youthful vigour to the party despite being in his mid 40s, might have expected to serve an apprenticeship on the backbenches.

Yet he was appointed to Cabinet in August 2003 after Alex Scott had emerged triumphant following the bitter stand-off between the Jennifer Smith and Ewart Brown camps.

Keen to keep the Smith loyalists on board Mr. DeVent was given the Minister without Portfolio brief while more experienced Brown supporters were left on the sidelines.

And in January 2004 he was thrown in the deep end with the Works and Engineering and Housing brief.

Less than a month later a visibly nervous and shaking Mr. DeVent was given the job of announcing Government was to spend another $13 million on the Berkeley school project and admitting its completion date would be delayed for yet another year.

The Berkeley controversy, which many blamed on Mr. Scott?s original choice of contractor ProActive when he had held the ministry, rumbled on throughout Mr. DeVent?s tenure, culminating in him sacking ProActive from the job and facing the flak from former friends.

There was much work to do on the PR front. Mr. DeVent?s lugubrious manner and stilted speaking style won few admirers in Parliament, while, for a former journalist, he seemed oddly ill at ease with the media.

There was no respite in his other brief at Housing where an impatient public demanded houses ? not surveys on how deep the housing problem went.

The Bermuda Homes for People project should have been his salvation. Slated to provide nearly 200 cut-price homes at Southside the public/private scheme promised huge political dividends.

But as the deadline neared for the bulldozers to move in it became clear that the business tenants at the waterfront site were not going to budge as they had not been given notice by landlords Bermuda Land Development Corporation. And they had nowhere to go.

Hampered by delays, the plan fell flat with project manager John Gaston claiming Mr. DeVent?s directives to BLDC were ignored by the quango he was supposed to be in charge of and that Mr. DeVent was weak even within his own party.

Meanwhile plans to build at Perimeter Lane and in Prospect were blocked by residents. With the vultures circling Mr. DeVent hoped Lt. Col. Burch could get the ball rolling again on the housing front as quango consultant.

But in the end, all that appointment did was to boost the profile of his eventual successor.