WILL THE GSD MAKE THE NEWS?

Some years ago I wrote that when the colossi of Gibraltar politics, Peter Caruana and Joe Bossano, decided to call it a day it would cause major seismic change.

Well Joe Bossano has announced he will not lead his GSLP in to the elections expected in 2011. He founded the party and will be a player but he will not be the Rock’s next chief minister if the GSLP – Liberal coalition triumphs as present opinion polls indicate it will.

I presumed this would be the news, now I am not so sure. Joe Boss has delivered a GSLP in good shape to the next generation of leaders and the alliance with the Liberals has never been stronger. So maybe the news will be elsewhere.

Peter Caruana led his centre-right GSD to power in 1996 and has been a victor at the polls on four consecutive occasions. So surely he’ll go for a fifth victory or will he?

Gibraltar’s legendary leader, Sir Joshua Hassan, was a four term chief minister so Caruana has matched his record. If Caurana went for a fifth – and won – he would cement his place in the Rock’s history. Yet if he lost he’d be remembered more for that defeat than his victories.

So why should he pass up another attempt? Two opinion polls in the Chronicle and Panorama have suggested he would be defeated. Polling day is still a long way off but if the people of the Rock have decided it is time for a change there is little Caruana can do to stem that tide. Also the Bossano bogeyman will no longer be there to poke a stick at – the GSLP – Liberals will be led by a new generation of politicians – as Cameron and Clegg have demonstrated it can be an irresistible combination.

If Caruana did lose I doubt he would hang about to lead the loyal opposition as Bossano has. He’d rush off in his wig and gown to earn some dosh at the Bar.

Which of course leaves his GSD in a quandary. It had been assumed that his deputy Joe Holliday would be the man to take over but there have been suggestions he won’t be a candidate at the next elections even if Caruana fights on. This would open up a power battle within the GSD that could split the party asunder.

The minister of justice, Daniel Feetham, has ambitions to the top job. However a political carpet bagger he may be but also at heart he is a socialist. His father was a minister in one of Bossano’s administrations, Danny was a member of New Labour in the UK, joined the GSLP but stamped his foot when Bossano wouldn’t stand down, rushed off to form the Labour Party and after getting a bloody nose at the polls scampered off to be Caruana’s bag carrier before being elected at the last election.

Feetham joining the GSD and its merger with his Labour Party has already caused a split with several key members including political heavyweights Keith Azopardi and Nick Cruz going off to form the PDP. It is difficult to see Feetham leading a party whose core membership oppose everything he stands for. However if he tries and fails it could see the leaders of the struggling PDP and perhaps former deputy chief minister Peter Montegriffo returning to the GSD as soon as Caruana is out of the door.

I suspect whilst all eyes are currently on the GSLP it is the GSD where the action will be. I shall keep looking in both directions.

CARUANA VERSUS FEETHAM

Yesterday I blogged on the debate that is going on in Gibraltar over the need or not to bring the age for sexual consent for homosexuals in to line with that for heterosexuals. The minister of justice, Daniel Feetham, seems to have one view on this issue, whilst the chief minister, Peter Caruana, has another.

Dr Joseph Garcia, the leader of the Liberal party who are in coalition with the GSLP observed: “The view of the Minister, who is a lawyer, was that the equalisation of the age of consent in Gibraltar was a legal obligation. The Chief Minister, who is a QC, maintained that it was not necessarily a legal obligation.”

Today I want to take a closer look at the two individuals involved here – Caruana and Feetham.

Like us start with Daniel Feetham. Now I am sure that in the real world he is a greatly loved man both by his family and his friends. I say this because I suspect that in the political world the opposite is true. If there is one quality politicians like in their colleagues it is loyalty whereas Feetham is a carpet bagger.

Daniel Feetham is a highly skilled lawyer. He returned to Gibraltar from the UK where he had been a member of New Labour and promptly joined the GSLP. His father Michael, is renowned on the Rock for being a civil rights activist, helped found the party in 1979 and later was a minister in Joe Bossano’s GSLP administration. The problem was that Daniel Feetham is a man in a hurry and Joe Bossano who is strictly Old Labour was in his way. Now the GSLP was and to an extent still is a Bossano fiefdom so there was only going to be one winner in that tussle. Hence our young lawyer stomped out the door with some supporters and formed the Labour Party which he led in to the 2003 elections.

Predictably the Labour Party failed to win a single seat. I then wrote several columns in which I predicted that the Labour Party would not survive to fight the next election or certainly not with Feetham at the helm. This earned me several angry emails from Daniel in his Lion’s Den insisting that he and the Labour Party were forever so taking me to task for doubting his word.

Come the next election in 2007 there was no Labour Party and Daniel Feetham was a candidate for the governing GSD. He had angered the GSLP, had no friends in the Liberals, had let down his colleagues in Labour and now caused a split in Caruana’s GSD because he was seen as both a threat and an opportunist. Keith Azopardi, who had been deputy chief minister, left the GSD in disgust with fellow member Nick Cruz and formed the PDP. Curiously the chief minister, Peter Caruana, had courted Feetham by consulting him on various issues, using him as a bag carrier on overseas trips and finally appointed him as his minister of justice.

Now Caruana seems not to attract affection either except from members of the GSD. He has been called a small town lawyer who is interested in only speaking to the British and Spanish foreign ministers and accused of ignoring the leaders of the Campo de Gibraltar. However he has won four elections on the trot so even his political rivals have to doff their cap.

In the debate on the age of consent Feetham brought a private member’s bill to Gibraltar’s parliament seeking to equalise the age at 16. It was a private member’s bill because whilst Feetham argues that it is a legal obligation his boss says it isn’t and anyway he couldn’t vote for it on religious grounds. Hence the move was defeated with Caruana voting against Feetham’s bill but now the matter is being sent to the Supreme Court for a definitive ruling.

Now the court is either going to back Feetham or Caruana so one will be the victor and the other the vanquished. I admire Daniel Feetham for one thing – he is determined to be chief minister and doesn’t care which party he leads to achieve that goal. He could be very successful in the role. In contrast Peter Caruana is already a four times winner and seems to take the view that his God will tell him when its time to step aside. Presumably that God is the same one that states that lowering the age of consent for homosexuals hasn’t got a prayer and that God certainly isn’t Daniel Feetham. So what we are seeing here is a tussle between the pretender and his lord and master. It will be interesting to see if Feetham has learnt anything from his battle with Bossano because Caruana will go at the time of his choosing and there are other GSD heavyweights lined up to succeed him.

I’LL BE BUGGERED

An interesting event will take place in Gibraltar’s Parliament this coming Monday (May 18). The Minister for Justice, Daniel Feetham, will seek the support for a motion that will allow him to bring forward an amendment to the Criminal Offences Act that will see the age of sexual consent for homosexuals brought in to line with that for heterosexuals.

Obviously the move has the government’s “blessing” so why is it a private member’s bill? Quite simply because as it is deemed a matter of conscience MPs will be able to vote as their personal conviction demands – hence ruling GSD MPs do not have to support it.

Now the vote on May 18 will be on Feetham’s right to introduce the legislation and not on the bill itself. So if the MPs vote “no” then his bill will not even receive a hearing.

In the wider world the ages of consent for heterosexuals and homosexuals are more often than not the same. However Gibraltar is not the wider world and government policy on homosexuals is conservative in the extreme. For instance the government will only grant housing units to conventionally married couples and not those of the same sex.

It could be argued that as the opposition is made up of socialists and liberals then Daniel Feetham should be able to count on their support. Even if that were true – Feetham has in the past attempted to politically bugger the leader of the opposition, Joe Bossano – so there is no love lost there.

Now as Daniel Feetham is a legal eagle and I do not want to attract any writs let me explain more fully. Feetham returned to Gibraltar after being a member of New Labour in England. He joined the GSLP – a party his father had served as a minister. Then when Joe Bossano refused to make way for the young pretender Feetham quit the party and formed the Labour Party in direct opposition. It was only when that party fell flat on its face at the 2003 General Election that the now Minister for Justice dumped it and scurried over to the GSD winning his seat in 2007.

Hence it is unlikely that Feetham will receive any favours from the honourable members opposite. So what of his own party? The likelihood is that some of the MPs of the GSD have grave doubts about the legislation (and may be about Daniel Feetham too). Hence it could well be that his motion will go down in flames... leaving Daniel Feetham truly buggered.