The Bar should concern itself less with any perceived intrusion into Conteh’s tenure and more with how quickly this government could lay waste judicial independence, in the name of righteous action.

With the prime minister passing off stale, half-baked dishes from his kitchen Cabinet as nouveau cuisine, should we bother waiting around to taste his anti-crime dessert?

On April Fools’ Day the government enacted a legislative torpedo – the Supreme Court of Judicature Amendment Act – that has blasted a gaping hole through Belize’s regime for foreign investor protection.

There is a worrying failure to come up with a plan factoring in short, medium and long-term modules to address the problem. If we wait another five years, we will have to convert the Belize Defence Force into a law enforcement agency since the greater threat to national security will be a purely home-grown, internal threat.

The admission exposes that awful irony of governance so black and thick it could be pumped out of the ground like Belizean crude. Seventy cents out of every dollar of revenue earned by government goes to pay the salaries of public officers who, we are now told, are incapable of carrying out a development agenda.

Approaching Nyon; next stop Lausanne. Lausanne: headquarters of the International Olympic Committee and known as the Olympic Capital of the world. It is the global centre for sports administration and, of course, the home of the Court of Arbitration for Sports – the CAS – at which Belize has a fateful appointment.

The question the minister must now ask himself is whether the abolition of corporal punishment in schools which he bravely and urgently lead was worth pissing off the unions, damaging his personal reputation and dissipating his government’s rapidly depleting store of good will. For what, a delay of six months?

Avert your gaze from the cursed pool of Narcissus glittering with the reflection of your own righteousness and superiority; it is transfixing but insubstantial.

The Opposition’s response to the crime situation has been the boilerplate, politics-as-usual approach to call for the resignation of the Minister of National Security as if someone from the government or opposition benches could do a better job.

The British have a moral obligation to offer reasonable compensation to the families who have been traumatized or had members killed by the grenade attacks; to do their best effort to find those grenades. It is a small price to pay for the death and terror that their negligence has unleashed in a city given over to criminality and chaos.