People reading too much into Antigua PM ‘joke’ – Dr Friday

Leader of the Opposition Dr Godwin Friday has asserted that the conversation he had on the telephone with the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, was nothing outside of a normal congratulatory call.

Browne, who was re-elected last week when the Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party (ALP) won the elections on March 21, spoke on the Antiguan radio station PointeFM about a conversation he had with Friday.

Browne relayed the conversation by indicating to the radio announcer, “I’ll give you a joke. The Leader of the Opposition in St Vincent called me just after elections. So, he said, ‘look Gaston, I’ve been watching, I’ve been following the campaign for the Labour Party, I wanna tell you, I mean, your strategist is something else.’”

He continued by saying that Friday asked him if he had used a strategist from the United States or the United Kingdom, and that the Leader of the Opposition indicated that he needed to get on to the strategist because, “we have a problem down here, we need to win! I need to get on to your strategist, whatever he costs.”

Browne stated he had replied, “Boss, we don’t run the foreign strategists, you know, Labour Party runs its own campaign.”

To laughter, he said that Friday then asked him “So, who? Who’s the stra…? You’re the strategist?”

SEARCHLIGHT contacted the Opposition Leader yesterday, who stated that the he does not recall the details of the conversation, with regard to the whether he asked about a foreign strategist and saying “we have a problem down here, we need to win.”

In giving his version of the conversation, Friday stated, “What the gist of the conversation was, again I don’t have word for word, was that I called him to congratulate him on his success, and he told me about how he had made progress, and I noted that as well since the last election…the issue of how he managed to campaign and so on, I asked him that and he said well, he did the campaign himself, and I think that’s what he was saying in that interview that he had on the radio, was by way of emphasizing that, that he actually did it himself and I congratulated him on that.”

The Leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) indicated that the point that he believed Browne was trying to bring across, “when I listen to the clip from the interview that he did, I think that’s the point that he was really making, and the conversation between us was by way of illustration of how impressed he thought I was by the way in which he managed his campaign.

“I think that’s the point that he was making, that I was impressed, which is true. I was impressed with the fact that he had increased his vote, his majority and in turn picked up a seat and could have seemed very close to picking up another one,” Friday stated.

In conclusion, he relayed, “This is normal for us to do, you know, you call the winner of a campaign and you let them know that you appreciate the fact that they’ve won, and congratulate them, and make some small talk and so on, depending on how well you know the person, and that was the spirit of the conversation that I had with Prime Minister Browne and I don’t think that he would understand it any differently, and any sort of interpretation that tends to, seems to suggest otherwise, I think that is just people reading too much into it.”