He acculturated quickly and with a mixture of talent and smarts bootstrapped himself into the dizzying stratosphere of the rap world and into the company of megastars like Jay Z, P Diddy and Jennifer Lopez.

The party leader is caught between the visceral, untamed ambition of his deputy and the resurrected ghost of the party leader past. But he should not be spooked.

Mr. Elrington’s remark that there is no money for judicial travel is hypocritical. Ministers as well as bureaucrats travel a great deal more than judges do. The travel expense of a single government department is greater than that of the judiciary as the third branch of the state.

Taxpayers money used to maintain non-functioning municipal bureaucracies could be directly applied to the upkeep of infrastructure if city councils and town councils were abolished and replaced with a handful of appointed, skilled city and town administrators.

Given the composition of the Commission, it is easy to see them deciding that the judge should be given leave to write his outstanding judgments and that benchmarks for the writing of judgments, which do not currently exist, be agreed upon for the future.

Semi-professional basketball was a fool’s dream. Just as foolish as building a new satellite “city” at Mahogany Heights when the country can’t even keep the streets of the existing cities and towns paved and free of garbage.

The magician’s assistants worked feverishly behind the scenes to prepare him for the second part of the show. The second part would be more difficult to perform, especially since there was no script for it. It would have to be played out in real time with unknown actors and no script.

Barrow, like the shirtless Putin astride his white steed in Siberia, is displaying his political muscle for all to see; master, for the moment, of all he surveys.

With steely stoicism he absorbed these public adversities – and tragic private ones – without becoming embittered or cynical. The fires of his political education had forged a mettle to take the fall for the party if that was how it had to be.

It required an almost reckless leap of imagination to see this pious, enfeebled, simple man in the role of the uncompromising, inflexible firebrand he once was; “the soldier without a gun” as he referred to himself.