To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?Last Sat­ur­day, in this space, we de­scribed as "ex­tra­or­di­nary" and a speech that "marked a wa­ter­shed in the life of T&T's Par­lia­ment," the 53-minute state­ment by Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning out­lin­ing the lo­cal re­la­tion­ship be­tween church and state, his own adop­tion of born-again Chris­t­ian val­ues and his de­fence of the right of the "prophet­ess" of a tiny con­gre­ga­tion, who he ac­knowl­edged is his spir­i­tu­al ad­vis­er, to build a huge $30 mil­lion place of wor­ship in re­mote Heights of Gua­napo. Giv­en the con­text of last week's events–which are des­tined to have se­ri­ous po­lit­i­cal, fi­nan­cial and spir­i­tu­al reper­cus­sions in this coun­try for years to come and the fact that the sto­ry of the "prophet­ess" and the Prime Min­is­ter is still un­fold­ing–we main­tain out de­scrip­tion of Mr Man­ning's speech. But how then should yes­ter­day's events in Par­lia­ment be de­scribed? With a lit­tle more than a week of ex­pe­ri­ence un­der her belt as the Leader of the Op­po­si­tion, Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar is hand­ed one of the biggest po­lit­i­cal gifts that it is pos­si­ble to imag­ine in the cur­rent sce­nario.

In a sur­pris­ing move giv­en his pre­vi­ous de­nials, House Speak­er Baren­dra Sinanan clears the way for Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar to lead a de­bate on an is­sue that has tor­tured T&T's pub­lic af­fairs space for more than two years: The pro­cure­ment prac­tices of Cana­da-born Trinida­di­an na­tion­al, Calder Hart, at the state-owned, spe­cial pur­pose com­pa­ny Ude­cott. The Op­po­si­tion would have come to the de­bate armed with what amounts to, in a lo­cal con­text, weapons of mass de­struc­tion: First, the still-un­proven, but de­cid­ed­ly juicy doc­u­ments which the Con­gress of the Peo­ple al­leged­ly re­ceived from Malaysia which claim, in ef­fect, that Mr Hart grant­ed a $368 mil­lion con­tract to rel­a­tives of his wife. Sec­ond­ly, as the de­bate was sup­posed to have been held on the ad­journ­ment of the nor­mal ses­sion of Par­lia­ment, Op­po­si­tion MPs would have had sight of the seem­ing­ly bal­anced and cer­tain­ly well-re­searched and thought­ful judg­ment of High Court judge Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er.

That judg­ment, which does great cred­it to the lo­cal ju­di­cia­ry and sure­ly places Ms Dean-Ar­mor­er in line for swift pro­mo­tion, came down against Ude­cott's ac­cu­sa­tion that the en­tire $120 mil­lion Uff Com­mis­sion of En­quiry should have been quashed be­cause all but one of the com­mis­sion­ers were bi­ased against Mr Hart. The judg­ment paves the way for Prof John Uff, QC, to de­liv­er his re­port to Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards. Prof Uff him­self did not es­cape un­scathed, feel­ing the sting of the judge's lash as he was chas­tised, af­ter she ap­plied cer­tain le­gal tests of bias, for sev­er­al counts of "neg­li­gent au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism" which were "re­gret­table but falling short of the at­ti­tude of mind against Mr Hart and Ude­cott." The mo­tion would have been de­bat­ed but for the im­ma­ture an­tics of the for­mer Op­po­si­tion Leader, Bas­deo Pan­day, and his new best friend (but up un­til re­cent­ly his sworn en­e­my), Kelvin Ram­nath, who re­fused to stand up when the Speak­er called for a di­vi­sion.

T&T's Par­lia­ment has nev­er be­fore wit­nessed mem­bers of the Op­po­si­tion vot­ing against a sub­stan­tive mo­tion as op­posed to a pro­ce­dur­al one. As the week­ly go­ings-on in Par­lia­ment take on the bizarre and un­ex­pect­ed plot twists and back­room in­trigues of the Amer­i­can sit­com The Young and the Rest­less in its hey­day, one is on­ly left to ask, in breath­less an­tic­i­pa­tion: What's next? Should we tune in next week?