Exclusive: Warner fought for Mark to get Senate leader's post in 2007

Wade Mark is one of the most loyal supporters of United National Congress (UNC) leader Basdeo Panday.

In fact when Panday first announced that he would seek reelection to the post of party leader Mark was the first to back Panday and offered to sign his nomination forms.

Mark, who is one of the UNC's three deputy political leaders and a former party chairman, also strongly opposes Chaguanas West MP Jack Warner.

He is convinced that Warner has been one of the people who tried to squeeze him out of the Senate. Mark was the opposition Senate leader in the previous Parliament and was reappointed to the post in the current Parliament.

But the irony of all this is that he owes that not to his political leader but to Warner. So if Mark wants to hold a grudge about who tried to steal his thunder he should be looking at Panday.

Two days after the general election of 2007 a small group of party officials met privately to discuss among other things, who would get the six Senate seats in the new Parliament.

Panday proposed Congress of the People (COP) leader Winston Dookeran and was promptly shouted down. But he stood his ground and argued that such a move would be consistent with what he said on the eve of the election that he wanted to mend fences and unite with COP.

But the others who were there, including Warner and Ramesh L. Maharaj, said it was also inconsistent considering the fact that the election night "look in the mirror" speech was not on the theme of uniting with Dookeran.

In that speech Panday blamed Dookeran for the PNM victory.

Read the story: Panday verbatim

Panday argued that it would a good strategic move because Dookeran would turn down the offer and then he, Panday, would be able to say it was Dookeran who didn't want to unite.

Earlier in the meeting the officials made a unanimous decision to appoint Maharaj as Chief Whip in the House of Representatives and his main task in and out of Parliament would be to reorganize the party to get back in government.

So when Maharaj insisted that the Dookeran idea was a bad one, Panday backed off.

But Panday had another idea that seemed to be popular among most of the UNC officials present. The idea was to fire Mark and hand the job to Dr Carson Charles, who was the leader of the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), which was one of the parties that contested the elections as part of the UNC Alliance (UNC-A).

Charles had contested the St Joseph seat, which he had held in the NAR government, but lost to the PNM's Kennedy Swaratsingh.

It was Warner who intervened and suggested that it was wrong to dump Mark. He disagreed strongly with his colleagues who were saying Charles would be better suited to lead the Senate because he was more articulate than Mark. There were even some pejorative statements about Mark.

But Warner argued that Mark had been a strong voice for the party in the Senate, was a fighter and campaigner for the party and that nobody should deny him his rightful seat in the Senate.

He knocked down the suggestion that he had just been beaten by the PNM's Christine Kangaloo in what was a UNC seat held previously by Gillian Lucky.

Warner said that was irrelevant since Charles was also a defeated candidate and in any case, Panday had established a precedent as prime minister to appoint as senators members of the party who had been defeated in general elections.

After a lengthy discussion the group conceded and accepted Warner's recommendation to keep Mark as Senate leader.

Both Mark and Charles showed up after the discussions and nobody told Mark about the heated arguments that had taken place ahead of his arrival.

It was not the first time that Warner had stood up for Mark.

In previous election campaigns in 2001 and 2002, Communications adviser Roy Boyke wanted to discard Mark entirely from the political platform. He argued that Mark was not presenting "the right image" and should not be chairing important national meetings during the campaigns.

But Warner and certain "lesser" communication advisers disagreed and Boyke grudgingly agreed to leave Mark alone. Still Boyke was able to push Mark aside for a few meetings.

Boyke also wanted to squeeze out Kelvin Ramnath, especially in the 2002 campaign, when he and Gerry Yetming, who was the campaign manager, argued that Ramnath represented an "Indian constituency" that was OK for the cottage meetings in the UNC heartland but not for the national stage.

Even Roodal Moonilal agreed that Ramnath should not speak on the major platforms, suggesting that Ramnath's politics was no longer relevant.

Panday was not privy to those discussions but when he learned about it he put his foot down and demanded that Ramnath speak on the national platforms.

Boyke also had problems with Kamla Persad-Bissessar. She was the designated "law and order" spokesperson in the 2002 campaign, but he wanted to sidestep her and push Gillian Lucky, who had become a very forceful platform speaker.

Lucky got some vital face time on the national platforms, which helped her win her seat in Pointe-a-Pierre. She later walked out of the UNC over a disagreement over Panday and others on the infamous "teacup affair" involving Chandresh Sharma and Keith Rowley.

JAI PARASRAM