PERHAPS if he communicated an overriding sense of purpose, something to the effect there can be no growth in Bermuda without growing pains, that a firm and steady hand is needed to guide the island through a particularly painful transitional period which could be of open-ended duration, there might be a smidgen more sympathy for him. Perhaps if he clarified those convictions which he says provide him with an unshakable sense of self-confidence in his course of action, his critics would be less inclined to charge him with arrogance and a galloping case of power mania. Perhaps if he argued that his sometimes autocratic strategies were necessary to maintain in his party a sense of direction providing its members with a clearer appreciation of the goals they are supposedly striving towards ¿ people might more readily accept short-term upheavals as an unavoidable consequence of bringing about long-term good.

But he does none of these things.

Instead Bermuda's Premier routinely ignores or, increasingly, attempts to annihilate inconvenient facts. Anything which suggests the carefully manicured and maintained version of his life story is not in fact an intoxicating power fantasy for the powerless, anything pointing to the hard-to-avoid conclusion he is not in fact a tireless activist for the dispossessed and needy but rather a stealth agent for the enemy camp, is dismissed as a smear. Or the product of envy. Or unimpeachable evidence of racist skulduggery.

Make no mistake, the Cabinet Office is currently directing a counter-insurgency campaign in Bermuda against not just criticism but reason itself. And it's such an increasingly ruthless operation you might as well start measuring all objective facts, all of the independently appraised evidence of your ears and eyes, for their winding sheets. Because in Dr. Ewart Brown's Bermuda they are to be hunted down, slaughtered and bulldozed into the mass grave of history.

Look around you and try and reconcile the mounting evidence of stagnation, drift and, yes, corruption with whatever glossy but entirely unconvicing cover story the Premier's handlers would have you believe this week.

Statistics as relentlessly grim as the news out of Afghanistan show steady, across-the-board declines in everything from tourism arrivals to educational achievement to career opportunities for Bermudians in the island's primary industry. Runaway growth only exists when you start tallying the numbers of Bermuda's working poor. The Premier's own plummeting approval figures are approaching the terminal velocity normally only attained by a skydiver in free-fall - or perhaps in a George W. Bush tracking poll.

Yet the Cabinet Office thinks it can continue to dissemble its way out of this convergence of bad news rather than demonstrate something approximating a sense of resolve. Spin, distortion and the Premier's increasingly threadbare personal style continue to be substituted for substantive policies that might actually reverse this spike in Bermuda's Misery Index. Indeed, those closest to the Premer prefer to interpret all of this discouraging data with the same blase disregard for mathematical precision demonstrated by those responsible for maintaining the coolant systems at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, an unhappy practice that will one day result in similarly unhappy consequences.

The Premier's bodyguards in politics and the media are acting out the old Chinese proverb which suggests when a wise man points at a full Moon, the idiots will look at the finger. And given Dr. Brown's henchmen condescendingly believe Bermuda is populated almost exclusively by idiots, they are frantically attemoting to misdirect their attention towards the offending digits of the Auditor General, the UK Foreign Affairs Committee, the Press and any and all other naysayers.

But in an encouraging development, more and more Bermudians are ignoring these clumsy and increasingly desperate attempts to distract them. The rhetoric of Dr. Brown's most ardent defenders is so old it now has the whiff of mothballs about it, the antics they employ to try and hijack public attention are as mechanical and predictable as the timers on the Paget traffic lights.

Bermudians are turning their attention instead to the luminous globe hanging above them, its face pockmarked by the impact craters of various unresolved scandals, unfulfilled promises and scolding international indictments which make clear Bermuda falls far short of what is considered to be Best Practice in both the administration of its off-shore financial services sector and its political affairs.

To all but the most deluded and those on his payroll, Dr. Brown is increasingly becoming a Messiah whose promise has gone unredeemed, the physician/statesman who has yet to demonstrate the remedial power of politics. Far from ministering to the soul-sickness he claims to have identified in his community, he is presiding over a dissolute body politic through which inertia, self-dealing and corruption are coursing like powerful ¿ and potentially lethal ¿ toxins.

While he and his diminishing band of loyalist continue to demonstrate their fluency in the language of duplicity, treating their support base like the most naive and gullible of dupes, a growing number of Bermudians now accept the fact Dr. Brown is less likely to lead a revolution in Bermudian public affairs than he is to complete a counter-revolution with the high-living low-lifes to whom he appears to be outsourcing the entire administrative apparatus of this island.The Premier has been entirely more successful in this regard than he has been in repackaging Bermuda's dormant Tourism product, rebranding himself as an elitist in the public eye and fostering the widespread perception he is less interested in creating jobs for Bermudians than is in exporting jobs overseas for the boys.

Most Bermudians have come to view the whole sorry mess in deadpan fashion. They accept the fact politics is a hopelessly rigged game, that many of those doing business with Government regard Bermuda as a land grab, that disingenuousness is the default mode of all communication emanating from the Cabinet Office. They understand corruption is not only entrenched in our public affairs but also bolstered by unspoken sanction from our apathetic British constitutional guarantors, that opportunism rather than conviction underlies too many decisions in the public policy field, that those who play by the rules in Bermuda should never expect to be thanked - let alone rewarded - for doing the right thing.

Perhaps it's not entirely too late for this Premier to avoid being remembered only as the gravedigger of the very revolution he claimed to be leading. Perhaps he can start to demonstrate a degree of self-awareness that has been entirely absent until now, acknowedging that fault for some of the misfortunes and embarrassments which have plagued his Government lies with him and not entirely with others. Perhaps he can start to replace the tired words about social justice and compassion and the need to protect those things which make life in Bermuda worthwhile with concrete actions and measurable targets.

But, then again, perhaps the time for such long overdue course corrections has come and gone - along with the public's tolerance for a Premier who thinks showmanship and statesmanship are interchangeable. - Tim Hodgson