The One Bermuda Alliance was weighed in the balance on July 18 and found wanting, particularly by the broad centre of the electorate.

In any parliamentary democracy, governments are formed from the centre, not the fringes. If an incumbent administration loses the centre ground, it loses the next election: it really is as simple as that.

And through a combination of blunders, poor communications and wishful thinking the OBA effectively ceded the all-important centre ground, and the 2017 General Election, to a re-energised Progressive Labour Party.

The OBA was elected to power in 2012 on a platform that emphasised renewed economic growth, greater opportunities for Bermudian workers and a return to fiscal responsibility after an extended period of unsustainable and unconscionable indiscipline.

Few could argue — or at least argue sensibly — with the substance of the OBA’s economic initiatives. They essentially saved the island from sinking into fiscal oblivion without resorting to any of the painful austerity measures so many other post-recessionary economies have had to endure.

But the routinely high-handed style of the OBA when it came to economic retrenchment? That was a different matter altogether.

It’s likely the OBA began to lose the confidence of the people with an approach to fiscal restructuring that could sometimes be overly cerebral, sometimes overly aloof — and left the impression the party was tone-deaf to the public mood and perhaps somewhat more responsive to vested interests than the common interest.

If it had difficulty effectively communicating its signature economic policies, the OBA often found itself completely tongue-tied when it strayed into highly charged sociocultural issues, most notably immigration reform and same-sex marriage.

For purely pragmatic political reasons, the OBA would have been best advised to postpone any efforts to rationalise the status of long-term residents or attempt to settle the question of gay unions until a second term.

Indeed, its clumsy, ultimately self-sabotaging approaches to both of these lightning-rod issues, polarising, divisive and supremely distracting as they were, ultimately may have cost the OBA re-election.

In both instances, political capital, moral authority and time were squandered; in both instances the courts would almost certainly have stepped into the political thicket to rescue parliamentarians from having to make decisions they were clearly uncomfortable making themselves; and in both instances the OBA’s claim on the political middle ground receded even farther.

The party’s bull-in-search-of-a-china-shop approach to immigration in the form of the Pathways to Status legislation put it at odds with the views of many thousands of middle-class Bermudians. And the OBA’s fragmented position on gay marriage not only put it at odds with itself but pitted some of its MPs against voters who felt themselves demeaned and devalued simply for attempting to maintain basic religious and cultural values they were raised with.

No good could come to the OBA from either of these political misadventures. And none did.

In closing, it is perhaps worth recalling the OBA was also elected, in part, because the party claimed to represent a radical departure from “dirty politics as usual” in Bermuda.

Formed only a year before the 2012 ballot by a merger of the Young Turks who had founded the Bermuda Democratic Alliance in 2009 and the old guard of a near-moribund United Bermuda Party, the OBA promised a fresh start — an opportunity to move beyond the largely racially stalemated voting patterns, which have defined Bermudian politics since the introduction of the two-party Westminster system in 1968.

But, in the event, that progressive spirit was never really very much in evidence outside the OBA’s 2012 campaign literature.

For the most part, it vanished with John Barritt.

The inexplicable decision to banish Barritt, one of the party’s founding fathers and the closest thing the OBA ever had to a guiding philosophical light, remains one of the great unexplained mysteries of modern Bermuda politics.

While a product of the UBP, he could certainly never be neatly pigeonholed as a reactionary or a tool of the old Bermuda business establishment.

Quite the opposite holds true, in fact.

A moderniser by instinct with a proven gift for tamping down internal party flare-ups as well as working across the political aisle, it was Barritt’s cast-iron conviction that Bermudian politics needed to evolve beyond the almost tribal stage it had been mired in since the 1960s.

It was his desire to see the Bermudian political culture become more genuinely democratic, responsive, productive and accountable that largely informed the OBA’s reformist agenda in 2012.

Having stepped down from his safe Devonshire seat in the House of Assembly to make way for the then unelected OBA leader Craig Cannonier, many observers fully expected him to be named as the party’s Senate leader after the December 17 election.

In the event, he was offered nothing, presumably as a consequence of internal jealousies and the jockeying for power and position within the new government, which started as soon as the last ballots were tallied.

More’s the pity for the OBA because the party could certainly have profited from his continuing presence over the past 4½ years.

Barritt intuitively understood that a government could drive change without creating divisiveness. Frustrated by the sterility and futility of adversarial politics in Bermuda, he had hoped to move towards a new type of political engagement, one that emphasised mutual respect, consensus and compromise over mutual loathing, mudslinging and obstructionism.

Unlike some of those who followed him, Barritt realised that building and maintaining trust, particularly with those who rarely agree with you, is what allows an administration to govern from — and continue to appeal to — the centre that elected it.