One of these things is not like the others,

One of these things just doesn’t belong,

Can you tell which thing is not like the others

By the time I finish my song?

One Of These Things (Sesame Street)

Curtis Dickinson did not deserve to go out like that. A crushing defeat in his Progressive Labour Party leadership challenge to David Burt neither accurately portrays the merits of the incumbent remaining as Premier of Bermuda, nor does it crystallise the former banker as wholly unsuitable for the top job in government.

What it does is confirm what we already know: that Mr Burt remains the most effective used-car salesman among the 36 elected Members of Parliament on either side of the aisle, armed as he is with years of experience in mobilising and stacking the deck.

Slick in his presentation and expert in working the room, the country’s youngest premier is populism personified. He has the young and the old of his party eating out of his hand — particularly the old on the evidence of the opening night of the Annual General Conference. No doubt, as hard as he has worked to keep his job, he will continue to put in the long hours in the attempt to make his final term as party leader a success.

But for whom and at what price?

Meanwhile, the lost opportunity that is Mr Dickinson is that, while he retreats into a faded green corner in the farthest recesses of the PLP “back, back, back, back bench” to see to the needs of his constituents in Pembroke South East — ostracised, viewed as out of touch with the party’s core principles, essentially “not one of us” — the country overall is deprived of arguably the most respected pseudo-politician at a time when the stock of the political fabric is plumbing the depths.

When the former finance minister abruptly quit his Cabinet post on the eve of the 2022-23 Budget Statement because of his dispute with the Premier over the Gencom/Fairmont Southampton deal, we suggested then that he could challenge for the leadership at the time of the delegates conference.

When exactly Mr Dickinson took or was convinced to take the plunge is unknown, but what the intervening eight months have shown us is that Mr Burt and his acolytes were ready for him — and you could say the campaigning began then.

First in the House of Assembly, where pitbull designate Chris Famous — without ever calling Mr Dickinson by name, mind — ripped into the former banker over the Fairmont Southampton deal. It was an attack that ultimately provoked a rebuke from the Speaker of the House, as uncomfortable as that might have been for Dennis Lister, the last person to challenge Mr Burt as party leader.

But the damage was done and with the barricade formed around the Premier, while the Bermuda Government played “deal or no deal” with Gencom, it was clear that Mr Dickinson was “not one of us”.

That much could be said to be true almost from the outset of his recruitment to contest and win in a by-election the seat left vacant in Warwick North East by the retirement of Jeff Baron in June 2018. Once he got his feet under him in the Lower House, Mr Dickinson was never going to stoop to the levels of discourse that have made our MPs so much less than the sum of their parts.

In fact, he has made a point of stating that he switches off before the motion to adjourn so as to not get involved in or be privy to the often unedifying and puerile mudslinging that surely removes the “first” from our world status and replaces it with “worst”.

Not so our premier, who appears to salivate over the prospect of one or more of his colleagues putting the Opposition in its place whenever the opportunity presents itself — another form of payback, rubbing noses in the dirt if you will, for the 40 or more years that the PLP and Black people in general suffered under the parliamentary thumb of the United Bermuda Party and its prescribed offshoot, the One Bermuda Alliance.

With a mischievously sly nod on Wednesday towards Zane DeSilva, who was acquitted this week of wrongdoing in the Covid party scandal that cost him his Cabinet post, we should prepare for more of the same next month when Parliament resumes.

That is not the PLP that Mr Dickinson wishes to promote, but what he has learnt in his short time in politics — and the hard way here — is that the sense of hurt and injustice at Alaska Hall runs deep, and those who feel it, those who know it, still wield influence within the party. And it is to their beat that Mr Burt and those who are in thrall to him dance when they find it most appropriate.

While not so much on the front foot when the plan to challenge for leadership was being hatched, the “All Praise Burt” machine sprang fully into action the moment Mr Dickinson’s candidacy became known.

First there were a slew of interestingly well-timed initiatives that Mr Burt could take credit for in the run-in to the delegates conference, followed by a blessing from above, as the Reverend Nicholas Tweed, who at the start of the year branded the Government as morally bankrupt over the Curtis Richardson affair, used his pulpit to communicate God’s will in favour of the incumbent.

This was followed, all too predictably, by an endorsement from Bermuda Industrial Union president Chris Furbert, giving the Premier a two-thirds approval from the People’s Campaign — remember them? — whose terms of reference must relate only to years when the PLP is not in power. (The remaining third has to be a silent partner as a Cabinet minister.)

The David Burt love-in reached a sycophantic climax at St Paul AME Church Centennial Hall on opening night when speaker after speaker, including the main man himself, espoused the virtues of the party leader and why he must be retained. All while Mr Dickinson had a front-row seat, forced into a dignified silence by “new” party rules that do not allow for a challenger to address the gathered masses outside of the official debate.

Hence the Hail Mary video release yesterday when Mr Dickinson took the shackles off to freely speak his mind about Mr Burt’s alleged economy with the truth, as he should have done on Saturday when given the chance — a tactical error by he and his advisers, albeit that the mountain to climb still might have proved insurmountable.

Now that he has spoken his truth, and has been handed this stinging reality check by the delegates and his “colleagues”, it is difficult to see a way back for Mr Dickinson into the PLP’s inner sanctum — at least not while Mr Burt holds the reins of power.

But he does have support. Otherwise, putting himself forward to challenge a man who has delivered successive landslide victories at the polls would be the equivalent of a fool’s errand — or, in the financial parlance with which he is most familiar, throwing good money after bad.

Mr Burt, for his part, must take this mandate for what it is: from party, not from country.

The resistance to his style of leadership in government is genuine and what the country needs to see for him to hold off a revolt is change represented by a turnaround in the people’s fortunes — starting with the cost of living, tax reform, delivering on healthcare, getting Fairmont Southampton signed, sealed and delivered, and arresting the genocide of young Black Bermudian men.

All this is conditional on Mr Dickinson not being a prophet of doom, in which case all bets would be off and the 21 minds that the MP from Constituency 21 was unsuccessful in changing so that he might unseat Mr Burt may develop a case of buyer’s remorse.