Citing the constitutional development of the Progressive Labour Party, former Attorney General Dame Lois Browne Evans yesterday said that MPs did not have the right to choose the leader after an election.

In an interview conducted prior to the party's decision to install Alex Scott as Leader and Ewart Brown as his deputy, she also endorsed Ms Smith's record as leader and Premier and said the 11 MPs who wanted her out of office were going against the wishes and expectations of the party members and violating the PLP constitution.

She denied widespread speculation that she had been advising the Premier through this latest crisis and said that had she been Premier, none of it would have happened.

"They are saying constantly that the Bermuda Constitution gives them the right to elect the leader," she said. "It does not."

The Bermuda Constitution says "nothing about party politics". "It is not in the Constitution how any party picks their leader."

But the Constitution does say that the Governor appoints the person he considers likely to command the confidence of the majority of the new parliament, and the dissidents had been relying on that provision to ensure that Ms Smith does not continue on as Premier.

Dame Lois was responding to a statement by the rebel MPs which said that they are "entitled to meet and elect a leader who will become Premier upon appointment by the Governor."

She said that in Britain, which handed Bermuda its political system, the Queen would appoint as Premier the leader of the winning party at an election.

"The unfortunate thing is some of those people are new," she said. "They don't go back to the early years but they do know that biannually you are endorsed as the leader of the party. How else would the body called the party control those members in parliament if they could go off and do as they like ?"

She said people should study party politics before they make a bid for elective office. She added: "Who else could bring down a leader in Great Britain but the party conference of delegates?"

As PLP members they had signed a pledge to abide by the rules of the party, she said.

"You cannot just not follow the wishes of your party. That's what it's about - party politics and that's what some people don't like about it because they don't want to be controlled.

"It's morally justified that the parties must have a say in who the leader is and if the Governor is not satisfied then the Governor does not have appoint and he can go back and have another election."

Asked what she expected to happen at the conference, she said: "Nature abhors a vacuum. Something must fill its place. You never know what it is until you walk the gauntlet.

"If I was the leader I know what has to be done. I would be more careful as to who I picked as candidates."

And she said she had not been advising Ms Smith, when asked.

"I haven't been advising her for a long time."

The mentorship ended when Ms Smith first became Premier.

"She has proved herself over and over to my knowledge and she can stand on her own two political feet. It's politics we are talking about and she has done a good job," Dame Lois offered.

"She has a good grasp of politics and a good understanding of the needs of the people. And she puts the needs of the people and the people's interest above herself. She is really an inward-looking person, not an extrovert like me. Artists are totally different to lawyers - that's her difficulty. She's following two persons who were lawyers and were gregarious. Added to that, being a woman, she's doubly disadvantaged. But nobody works harder."

Dame Lois said that Ms Smith's Cabinet colleagues should have put their shoulder to the wheel instead of engaging in "trivial" criticism.

"If somebody wasn't working against her for their own interest, if everybody threw their weight behind her, we wouldn't be in this mess. If people had accepted her for what she is - a workaholic and helped her and not bothered with the criticisms we would not be in this mess."

The criticisms were not genuine and "most of them are trivial".

After last night's conference, Dame Lois said that the exercise had been "painful" for Ms Smith.

The fact that she had endorsed Mr. Scott as Leader to "bring peace to both sides" and help the party go forward proved her "greatness".

"That's because she knows Mr. Scott for a longer time and she could trust him."

Ms Smith could have won the vote because she had the support of a lot of delegates, she added. But after endorsing Mr. Scott, her own branch then followed through.

"When you are in that spot, only you must make that decision."