Sir James tells Burton – say sorry before you get my support

Burton Williams, the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) candidate for South Windward, on Sunday apologized for running against the Party in 1994 after a fall out with NDP founder and then Prime Minister, Sir James Mitchell.{{more}}

Sir James demanded the apology during the NDP’s 32nd convention at the Party’s headquarters, Democrat House, while naming all the persons who had won on an NDP ticket since the formation of the Party in 1975.

He said Williams’ apology was necessary before he could give the candidate his full support.

“I want to say to Burton: Before he gets my 100 [per cent] support, I want to hear him apologize to the Party and the people of South Windward,” Sir James said to cheers from Party supporters.

“Because it was Burton who gave us the two Beaches,” he said.

The two Beaches that Mitchell referred to are former Minister of National Security Sir Vincent Beache and his son Tourism Minister Glen Beache.

Sir Vincent won the South Windward seat for the St.Vincent and the Grenadines Labour Party-Movement for National Unity coalition in the 1994 general elections ahead of Williams who ran as an independent candidate and the NDP’s Alfred Bynoe.

Sir Vincent’s son, Glen Beache, won the seat for the Unity Labour Party (ULP) in 2005, the SVLP and MNU having merged in 1998.

Williams, before outlining his plans for the constituency on Sunday, apologized to the NDP, stating he had followed the suggestion of his dying mother and apologized to Mitchell 10 years ago.

“I obediently and dutifully went to see Sir James and apologized to him. Today, I take the next step and say to you my people, I humbly apologize to you,” he said to cheers.

In asking for forgiveness, Williams quoted Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”, using the lines, “‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,/Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

“But let me give you my spin to it. If you can humbly acknowledge your wrong and ask forgiveness, you, my son, are a God-fearing man,” he added.

The former Minister of Health under the NDP administration related an anecdote from his childhood claiming that he had once muddied his pants when he fell in a banana field on his way to school.

He said he washed his pants at a river and arrived at school clean and on time.

“The question I want to ask you this afternoon: [Are] my pants clean enough?” he said to chants of “Yes! Yeah!”

The fiasco which resulted in Williams’s apology on Sunday began in 1994 after his handling of a health situation.

Williams was demoted as Minister of Health and placed under Mitchell ‘s “wing” as a junior minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister.

Thereafter, he resigned from Mitchell’s cabinet claiming that he wanted to spend more time with his constituents even as Mitchell revealed information about Williams’s personal and marital life.

Sir James had said Williams had come to his (Mitchell’s) house in tears one morning.

Williams had promised to tell the whole story during a television broadcast on the eve of the 1994 general elections but revealed nothing that was damaging to the NDP, which went on to win a third consecutive term in office.

“He ran against the party and I said anyone who runs against the Party and comes back to run for the Party should explain why he ran against the Party and bring the people back to support him,” Mitchell told SEARCHLIGHT when asked why Williams should apologize.

“In every family, there are misgivings and problems from time to time and I had my situation with the government in 1993/1994,” Williams told SEARCHLIGHT when the publication noted that he had not said what he was apologising for.

“Everybody knows about it. It is not worthwhile revisiting those issues, simply because we have learnt from them and it is important that we move forward,” Williams said of the circumstances surrounding his resignation from Mitchell’s Cabinet on the eve of the 1994 general elections.

“I think the people felt betrayed when I left the Party. I think the people in the New Democratic Party felt betrayed when I left the government in 1994,” Williams said.

Asked if he felt he had betrayed the NDP and his constituents, Williams told SEARCHLIGHT: “I do not want to revisit the specifics of that particular time and all that transpired around then. It is more noble and wholesome for me to focus my mind now on the way forward.”

Williams said that since quitting politics in 1994, he migrated to the United Sates for two separate stints in Florida and New York, operating a restaurant and children’s play ground in the Big Apple.

Asked what he would do if he is unsuccessful in his bid to represent South Windward again, Williams told SEARCHLIGHT:

“I don’t contemplate losing. Never in my life do I contemplate losing. (KXC)