“The fight to restructure Bermuda to benefit the many and not the few — the elite and privileged — wasn’t just a slogan or a cynical political promise. It remains at the core of who we are, what we stand for, and what keeps us focused on the job at hand.”

The above was penned by Vance Campbell in a January 25 op-ed steeped in criticisms of the same One Bermuda Alliance party with whom he has sensationally staked his political future a mere seven months later.

Notably it was also one of the first times post-2017 that a Progressive Labour Party MP has publicly apologised for not delivering the Bermuda it had promised in successive election platforms and in a variety of throne speeches.

What could have happened in those seven months for Mr Campbell to jump ship and bed in with the enemy?

Plenty apparently. But where do we start?

When did the cracks in the relationship between Mr Campbell and the party led by David Burt widen so much that the former decided to make good his escape rather than fall into the abyss of uncertainty?

Protest as he might that media perception of what is going on inside the PLP is mere fiction, the departures of Walter Roban, Kathy Lynn Simmons and now Vance Campbell so far out from an election are too much for the party leader to put down to the rampant imaginations of mischief-makers.

There is indeed trouble in the camp!

Mr Campbell had towed the party line for as long as he could, including speaking against distanced backbencher Curtis Dickinson over the Fairmont Southampton special development order, and regurgitating the party-line tropes of affordable housing, minimum wage, unemployment, the Civil Service, payroll tax and daycare:

“You see, thousands of Bermudians’ lives have been improved since 2017. Clearly, these are the undeniable facts that the OBA and [Vic] Ball wish to avoid speaking about. Let us never forget, we fight against forces who profit from the status quo and who will use every weapon in their arsenal to keep Bermuda exactly as it is.”

Fast-forward seven months and the script has flipped to:

“In assessing the years between 2011 and now, the conclusion that I kept coming to was that the political party that I joined many years ago — the Bermuda Progressive Labour Party — no longer represents the best option for a securing a better future for Bermuda. I can no longer visit my constituents’ homes and say to you, in all honesty, that I still have faith in the PLP. I can no longer ask you, my constituents, to support me as a member of the PLP.”

Mr Campbell said yesterday that this was not a snap decision, and we have to take him at his word.

So if that’s the case, when was it that he determined that he would leave the party where he had become embedded the past 13 years?

Could it have been last November when he had tourism ripped from his Cabinet remit and given to an unelected senator?

Could it have been more recent, when he was allegedly denied the prospect of moving to the super-safe seat of Pembroke East in the wake of Mr Roban’s impending retirement on the calling of the next General Election?

Or was it more sentimental?

Mr Campbell said he had his resignation letter written on July 1. Well, that was only seven days after he and cousin Jarion Richardson, leader of the OBA, spoke with great emotion at the funeral of uncle Russell Richardson, the late PLP sympathiser and champion for the St David’s community in which both have strong ties.

It is possible that it is none or all of the above, and that we must apply Occam’s razor to understand why a standing president of a social club deeply entrenched in the heart of “Back of Town” would cross over to join a party that many, rightly or wrongly, associate more with Front Street than with Court Street.

Yes, let’s keep it real: in joining the OBA, Mr Campbell cements his status as an MP — no matter the result of the next General Election.

As a PLP candidate amid a period of disaffection with the ruling party, he would have been in real danger of losing his seat in Smith’s West.

Mr Campbell beat Vic Ball, of the OBA, by a mere 29 votes in 2020 (we wonder how Mr Ball is taking this news). In doing so, though, his share of the vote among registered voters in Smith’s West had not improved appreciably from 2017 when he lost 540-405 to Trevor Moniz — 32 per cent in 2017 to 33 per cent in 2020.

With the PLP trending down, the belief, then, is that the door that had opened in the wake of the former attorney-general’s retirement from politics was about to be closed sometime before the end of 2025 — hence the desire to find something more secure, such as Pembroke East or the seat that Ms Simmons has just vacated in Sandys North.

All a moot point now as, with this “defection” which the PLP repeated in its snotty response to the news, Mr Campbell can expect to return his constituency to an anti-PLP stronghold reminiscent of the joint-ticket days when the presence of C.V. “Jim” Woolridge meant Smith’s South/West was on lockdown.

We leave you with this:

“In politics, there are some who put their own personal agenda before our country. They place the interests of the individual before the interests of the island. That is not who I am. Not at all.”

September 20 is not to be missed.