When Premier Paula Cox was elected as leader of the Progressive Labour Party, there were many who supported her because she represented something different from her predecessor, Dr Ewart Brown.Deservedly or not, Dr Brown’s administration had been tarnished by allegations of poor governance, and Ms Cox promised to improve these standards, and Bermuda’s reputation.To some extent, she has tried to do this, and the recent good governance bill is one example. Whether its passage was a tacit admission that standards of behaviour had been found wanting or not, the fact is that such legislation, if enforced, should help.But it’s one thing to talk about good governance and it is another to act.And Government has acted on occasion. Civil servants have been prosecuted. And in one defining moment, Ms Cox was forced to set herself off against her own Deputy Premier over the Bermuda Land Development Company.Although there are a great many side issues involved in the BLDC situation, the bottom line is that the Premier agreed with the Auditor General that it was inappropriate for the chairman and deputy chairman of the board to appoint themselves up as consultants to their own board and to ask their colleagues to approve payments to themselves of $80,000 each.On the face of it, Ms Cox was right to do this. And she was right to remove the board members, having moved control of the boards from the Deputy Premier to another Minister when he would not do so. This has been a costly political fight, and one Ms Cox would, no doubt, have preferred not to have had.However, Pastor Leroy Bean had already been nominated by the Progressive Labour Party delegates of St George’s South to run as their candidate there. Since then, many months have passed, Pastor Bean was duly announced — by Premier Cox — as the candidate for the area ten days ago.In that context, it was perfectly right for the media to ask about the contradiction in the announcement. This was, after all, a party member who was considered by the Premier to have acted outside the area of good governance.In theory, Ms Cox could have said that she was going to let bygones by bygones, or that this was democracy at work. Neither explanation would have been entirely satisfactory, but either would have been better than what Ms Cox did in fact say, which was to question why people made allegations of corruption and dishonesty, adding: “Is it because they have a black government? I think the issues with the Auditor General are clear. They’ve been documented, they’ve been set out. My views are also clear.”Ms Cox said there was nothing to indicate anybody was corrupt. “The candidates have to have the confidence of the constituency executive and they also have to have the confidence of the central committee,” said Ms Cox, adding no one would be announced as a candidate if she, as party leader, didn’t support them.“The very fact that I’m here when I don’t have to be should be an indication of the fact that Pastor Bean is part of the PLP team,” she said.It is disappointing that Ms Cox would have fallen back on a variation of Dr Brown’s “plantation questions” — that questions being asked would only be asked of a black government, and not of a white one — in refusing to address the issue.Even if this idea has some legitimacy, and in this newspaper’s opinion it has none, the question in this case was well founded and many PLP officials have told this newspaper that Ms Cox in fact had strong objections to Rev Bean’s nomination.So there’s no doubt that she had to make the best of a bad situation. This episode is part of a wider struggle for control of the PLP, and arguably for its soul. In that struggle, Ms Cox has much going for her. But she should not fall back on cheap racial tricks to win it. In doing so, she has disappointed many of those who thought she representing something different.