The spy who loved me

Google, as any search engine, cannot do its work without human input of key words pertinent to the query. It can?t read our minds, not yet. I typed “Manning prophetess”– in searches you don?t need the possessive apostrophe “s”. Google did not disappoint. In a quarter second it generated hundreds of hits with the name Juliana Pena. Among them, on YouTube, the infamous 2007 video of Benny Hinn preaching about the “foolish PM of Trinidad and Tobago and the foolish woman he brought to him who called herself a prophetess and through whom God allegedly spoke.” An embarrassment no matter how many times you view it. Foolishness. There forever to TT?s shame. I?d rather watch Kamla dance.

Before surfing Patrick Manning?s online legacy to our nation, I?d only a few days prior, remarked to a fellow journalist that I did not think there was a way to libel Mr Manning. TT?s former Prime Minister has no reputation, no name to defend, I argued. A man who walks around with a prophetess and tells foreigners that God is speaking to him through her, cannot seek the courts’ protection. He is decidedly unfit to lead.

But was Mr Manning ever an effective leader? His flashes of megalomania were evident before 1995 and his return to power in 2001 was by default. He became PM again because of a series of political misadventures and misjudgments. Are we truly surprised that Mr Manning was paranoid enough to have his spies tap the lines of those he considered a threat to him? Anyone who claims to have a direct line to God will search for devils everywhere.

I always wondered why Mr Manning got so hot under the collar when I started the No Red House for Manning series. I was one Sunday columnist, he was the Prime Minister. Where was the contest? Yes I regularly and roundly condemned his “foolish” spending of our funds, his attacks on TT?s democratic institutions but so what? He had the power, back then he still had many of the people.

He should have ignored me, or at least have recognised my right to differ, yet he could not. Mr Manning is a petty man. Whenever he spotted me, he’d glare at me and he’d regularly dispatch his poodles and pitbulls with warning messages. He can claim his agents were acting on their own initiative. I believe little or nothing of what Mr Manning says. He can sue me.

I?d like to share a secret now the spying cat’s out of the bag. Back in the No Red House days, every Sunday at midday in my inbox, lay in wait for me an irate email from a “Patrick Manning supporter” accusing me of bias. Now here’s the interesting morsel: the initials of the writer of the hate mail.

They were identical to those in the Pena Guanapo church mystery: PM. I was almost certain that none other than Patrick Manning was sending those emails and he wanted me to know that he was the author. I responded once or twice but decided that anything I had to say to Mr Manning I?d say openly. I also considered it a waste of my time corresponding with him, if it was Mr Manning sending the notes. Why was he wasting his time writing them to me? Had he no more pressing business?

And therein lay the key to his self-destruction: Mr Manning?s obsession with his “enemies”. He did not see journalists and judges and politicians and presidents doing their job. He was the only professional. With everyone else it was personal.

That paranoia blinded him to those he should really have been keeping an eye on: the many ordinary Joes who were growing to hate him and his skyscraper economic policies and his indifference to their suffering under the yoke of inflation induced by his administration’s runaway train. Those were the thousands and thousands on whom Mr Manning could not or did not think to spy and they were the ones who daily exchanged jokes via email about him. Those were his foes. They were the ones who got him. He, in touch only with God, cut the direct line to them. He knew nothing about them, disdained them, which is why he was “foolish” enough to ask them for a fresh mandate.

That was our Prime Minister: Patrick Manning, a man who believed that the way to everlasting power was through seer women, spies, spirits and spite. What a shame.