Parliament to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day.

What is clear is that its plans for the smooth election of Dr. David Dyer as Speaker of the House went up in smoke.

In itself, the election of the Hon. Ernest DeCouto, a former Deputy Speaker, is unremarkable. It is the prerogative of the whole House of Assembly, not any single party, to elect the Speaker.

Nor should it be forgotten that if Bermuda now has to wait even longer for its first ever black Speaker, it has its first Speaker of Portuguese descent.

What is significant about Friday's vote is that this is the first time the Opposition has succeeded in putting one of its nominees into the Speaker's chair and that the UBP's party discipline cracked at the beginning of a session when discipline will be all important.

The PLP took the initiative away from the Government on the first day of Parliament, and thus overshadowed the Throne Speech.

The UBP's leaders and whips were guilty of complacency in expecting that their members would inevitably follow the party line. Their failure to detect signs of rebellion or to recognise that some of their members were alienated shows they have not realised that this session of Parliament will be anything but business as usual.

The UBP's eagerness to push new faces into positions of responsibility in response to the electorate's call for change may also be responsible for the vote.

If Dr. Dyer was seen as insufficiently experienced to be the Speaker, then it was probably unwise to appoint Mr. John Barritt -- who has not been an MP before -- as Whip, a job which requires a strong grasp of Parliamentary procedure and of the likely behaviour of the UBP parliamentary group. At any rate, Mr. Barritt could surely not have had a more disastrous debut as Whip.

Appointments like this and of new and young MPs to Cabinet will likely lead to the mistakes that beginners are destined to make as they learn the ways of government. What the UBP needs to ensure is the damage is limited.

Doubtless the UBP members who voted with Mr. DeCouto will have had some hard thinking to do this weekend. Regardless of how strongly they believed in their cause, they have damaged their party's unity and weakened it just as it starts to put its legislative programme through the House.

By supporting a secret ballot, they have also been a little cowardly. If they strongly believed in their cause, they should have been prepared to vote in the open. In voting in secret, they have deniability -- but they have hurt their credibility with their constituents who have a right to know how they voted.

The PLP cannot be blamed for trying to "win'' the Speaker's election. But its members will have to ask themselves whether the price paid for a tactical victory was worth it.

After all, PLP members nominated Mr. DeCouto after spending the last session criticising him and accusing him of bias when he was presiding over the House.

And it will seem strange to many of their supporters that a party which placed as much emphasis on equal opportunity and the problems of institutional racism in the general election as the PLP did has turned down the chance to elect the first black Speaker of the House.

Mr. Frederick Wade argued Mr. DeCouto was the more experienced man and accused the UBP of tokenism in appointing the relatively young Dr. Dyer.

But he would presumably be the first to agree that experience is not all important. Nor could he argue that Dr. Dyer -- who has spent some eight years in the House -- lacks experience.

Instead he staked the PLP's position on the "tradition'' of electing the Deputy Speaker from the last House as Speaker in the new House.

But that tradition meant little in 1989 when the PLP nominated and voted for Mr. William Cox to be Speaker after the UBP nominated a former Deputy Speaker, the more experienced Mr. David Wilkinson, for the post.

And as the Premier has pointed out, the PLP was quick to jettison another tradition -- that of open voting in the House -- to secure its victory.

If the UBP was guilty of complacency and has been embarrassed, the PLP was guilty of expediency and hypocrisy.