PROVIDENCE, it is said, takes special care of small children and idiots. Perhaps it's time to add Bermuda to this exclusive list. For the island's relative prosperity, relative tranquillity and relative racial calm (which, while still far from ideal, remain a model of tolerance in an increasingly riven and intolerant world) are somehow managing to survive punishing body-blows being inflicted by a cretinised political leadership ? body-blows that surely would have crippled any other fragile micro-state by now.

But unless Providence really does have a special destiny in mind for the island, Bermuda's good fortune cannot continue indefinitely.

The Government is operating on automatic pilot. Cabinet no longer even bothers to discuss the non-existent progressive reforms Ministers used to claim would be enshrined in a still unwritten Social Contract.

Affordable housing, by far the top priority of rank-and-file Bermudians who are being economically outpaced by those employed in International Business, generates a lot of strategic planning talk but no bricks-and-mortar action (the shameful Bermuda Homes For People episode along with the looting of the Bermuda Housing Corporation coffers demonstrates just what a low priority public housing remains for this Government). The Police Service, by its own defensive admission, is undermanned and entirely unprepared to contain the spike in gang violence, an all too predictable consequence of the social disruption being experienced young, under-educated Bermudians unable to find meaningful employment or any sense of self-worth in the current boom town economic environment.

Despite all of this, despite the fact the margins of Bermudian society are not so much fraying as unravelling at an increasingly accelerated rate, the Premier's increasingly frantic political showmanship remains focussed on the attainment of a single Overriding Strategic Objective ? Independence.

Never mind that a Government which has demonstrated itself incapable of addressing what should be manageable domestic issues is probably not best equipped to run the complex logistical gauntlet of international visa negotiations, financial regulatory regimes and overseas diplomacy. The Premier remains deaf to all dissenting voices (now accounting for fully 80 per cent of Bermudian electorate).

He seems to regard his position as little more than Storyteller-in-Chief, weaving whimsical and soothing bedtime tales about sovereignty on the nightly TV news to a public he clearly regards as something akin to an idiot child.

The discredited and quite literally incredible Bermuda Independence Commission report remains P.'s answer to the collected works of Hans Christian Andersen. Its counterfeit claims the island could go to Independence at a discount cost of $5 million a year (less than what Cabinet Ministers now spend on overseas travel and half of what was spent on the island's cricket team) and the disingenuous white-washing of International Business concerns about the potentially ruinous impact Government's sovereignty-by-any-means-necessary programme could have on what is now the lone pillar of Bermuda's economy are parroted and re-parroted as if repetition could add substance to their insubstantiality. BIC members were recently garlanded with Royal honours (P.'s inner-circle is clearly an irony-free zone) in a belated attempt to revive the dead-at-birth report's believability and ongoing news value. But it seems almost certain that a Tyrannosaurus Rex could turn into a gallon of Esso Unleaded in less time than it will take for Bermudians to buy into the Premier's fanatical fairytales for adults.

Two years into his never-ending "national dialogue" on Independence, the Premier has yet to make a single argument demonstrating how the potential benefits of Independence will outweigh the potentially negative consequences. With vocal opposition to Independence now widespread throughout all racial and social strata of the Bermudian community, the Premier remains wedded to arguments that are implausible and, in some instances, entirely imaginary.

His yawning credibility gap on the matter notwithstanding, the Premier somehow manages to employ the most torturous logical routes to lead every issue on the public agenda back to his grand Independence illusion.

Bermuda, he says, cannot be a "real" democracy unless it is Independent despite the dubious examples offered by any number of sovereign totalitarian states (and don't forget he summarily rejects the most genuinely democratic mechanism ever devised ? the plebiscite ? as the means for deciding the sovereignty question). An Independent Bermuda, says P.'s designated hatchet man David Burch, is inevitable (so is death but few of us try to accelerate its schedule) and even the best-informed critics should simply leave the island now rather than continue attempting to inject a modicum of reason into what has become an entirely irrational exercise in Cabinet Office wish fulfilment. Even the brutalising of a Portuguese football supporter outside a Hamilton pub by yobbish/racist thugs was seized on by the Premier as a spurious pretext for pursuing sovereignty, as callow an example of political opportunism as any imaginable even for a man who routinely sinks to depths Dr. Robert Ballard might deem inaccessible.

Exactly a year ago Bermuda experienced a small-scale dress-rehearsal of what it could perhaps expect to experience on an ongoing basis in the sovereign Wonderland Alex Scott hopes to make an actuality.

On July 7, 2005, 52 people died and hundreds were maimed when al Qaeda wannabes detonated four bombs on London's public transportation system.

The world mourned along with the British.

Letters of condolence poured into London from kings and queens, presidents and heads of state, humanitarian figures and religious leaders ? including imams representing the tens of millions of Muslims who reject the perverse notion the Koran is a divinely-sanctioned answer to .

All condemned the massacre of innocent commuters.

All aligned themselves with Britain's zero-tolerance policy towards homicidal fanatics whose weapon of choice in their ongoing war against reason and modernity is the deadly made-for-television spectacular that demonstrates their ruthlessness to global audiences in real time.

All were dignified and sincere expressions of grief and condemnation.

All bar one that is.

Alex Scott was not to be left out of this international chorus of grief and condemnation. The clumsy results could have been anticipated given he runs Bermuda's Government in much the same giddily haphazard manner the evil twins of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would if, having tired of MGM's "Hey, let's put on a show . . ." routine, they opted instead to engage in some backyard banana republicanism.

The Premier put his name to a letter which sounded as if it had been drafted by a third-rate Bill Clinton impersonator feigning the 41st President's feigned empathy with other people's pain. He clucked, he pontificated, he recycled every clich? he hadn't already dragooned into service in the previous year's Throne Speech.

Then he added what was, even by his own woeful standards, a particularly bizarre postscript.

The Premier said Bermuda could well identify with London's anguish because a teenage love triangle had culminated in a stabbing aboard a party boat the previous weekend.

This is what students of such things would classify a wildly "false analogy". This is what students of psychology would classify as a "delusion of grandeur", demonstrating absolutely no sense of perspective as well as epic self-absorption. This is what Bermudians did in fact classify as facile, offensive and almost criminally inappropriate.

When the wire services picked up on his comments, Bermudians winced en masse. They buried their heads in their hands. When incredulous overseas friends phoned they lied, saying, no, Alex Scott, has nothing to do with us and Reuter and AP must have confused us with one of those "B" islands in the Caribbean.

If only that were so.

Despite its longstanding soft-spot for imbeciles (and the free-pass it seems to have granted the island in recent years), Providence will ultimately weary of the Bermudian Premier's ongoing efforts to translate his distorted Independence dreams into our collective reality. Even the special destiny Bermuda has enjoyed for so long cannot survive P.'s decision to play Russian roulette with its future using a fully loaded revolver.