To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Ear­ly yes­ter­day morn­ing, sur­round­ed by his fam­i­ly at his home in Mapps, St Phillip, David Thomp­son, the Prime Min­is­ter of Bar­ba­dos, passed away. He was just months away from his 49th birth­day. The politi­cian had bat­tled vig­or­ous­ly with pan­cre­at­ic can­cer since March this year when he be­gan med­ical tests to dis­cov­er the rea­son for lin­ger­ing stom­ach pains. David Thomp­son came to pol­i­tics for­mal­ly in 1987, win­ning the par­lia­men­tary seat of well known Bar­ba­di­an politi­cian Er­rol Bar­row af­ter his death in 1987. He was in­volved with the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Labour Par­ty (DLP) for years be­fore that with the youth arm of the par­ty and his suc­cess in Bar­row's seat was seen by many of the DLP faith­ful as an anoint­ment.

He would serve as Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment and Cul­ture from 1991 to 1993 and as Min­is­ter of Fi­nance from 1993 to 1994. Af­ter Er­sk­ine San­di­ford re­signed in the wake of a par­lia­men­tary no-con­fi­dence mo­tion, David Thomp­son led the DLP in two sub­se­quent elec­tions, with no suc­cess, in 1994 and 1999. In 2000, he re­signed as par­ty leader af­ter the par­ty failed to win the St Thomas by-elec­tion and it wouldn't be un­til the con­sid­er­able chaos in the DLP af­ter par­ty leader Clyde Mas­coll crossed the floor in 2006 to join the BLP that Thomp­son would again be­come leader of the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Labour Par­ty.

Two years lat­er, Thomp­son was elect­ed to of­fice in Jan­u­ary 2008, de­feat­ing the in­cum­bent Bar­ba­dos Labour Par­ty (BLP) 20 seats to ten to be­come the sixth prime min­is­ter of Bar­ba­dos. He won his seat in the St John con­stituen­cy that year with 84 per cent of the vote. Ac­tive as a le­gal con­sul­tant to the Com­mon­wealth Sec­re­tari­at, the Com­mon­wealth Par­lia­men­tary As­so­ci­a­tion, the Caribbean Law In­sti­tute, the Caribbean Pol­i­cy De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre and the Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at, he would as­sume for­mal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my with that 2008 vic­to­ry. He was called to the In­ner Bar in Bar­ba­dos in 2009, be­com­ing a Queen's Coun­sel af­ter 23 years as a lawyer.

Not­ing his pass­ing, Cari­com Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Ed­win Car­ring­ton said that "his short term as Prime Min­is­ter of Bar­ba­dos and thus Mem­ber of the Con­fer­ence of Heads of Gov­ern­ment of the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty did not af­ford him the op­por­tu­ni­ty and scope to make the full con­tri­bu­tion his tal­ents promised to bring to the in­te­gra­tion process at that lev­el." There is a re­al sense that Thomp­son was reach­ing his po­lit­i­cal peak when he was strick­en with can­cer and, trag­i­cal­ly, that his con­tri­bu­tion to the ef­fort to re­build the re­gion­al project has been cut short. Some of the short tenure of David Thomp­son in po­lit­i­cal of­fice was con­sumed with is­sues re­lat­ing to the glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis which struck just months af­ter he took of­fice.

That cri­sis, for which Thomp­son re­ceived high marks for the calm and sure way he guid­ed Bar­ba­dos, con­tributed to the col­lapse of Cli­co, a com­pa­ny whose Bar­ba­dos sis­ter com­pa­ny Thomp­son had worked for be­fore he be­came Prime Min­is­ter. The late Bar­ba­di­an leader was some­one who al­ways want­ed to re­main fo­cussed on the job at hand–which may ac­count for the fact that he de­layed dis­clos­ing the na­ture and sever­i­ty of his ill­ness for sev­er­al months af­ter his ini­tial di­ag­no­sis. But David Thomp­son can, in ret­ro­spect, be for­giv­en for try­ing to give as much as he could to the job. Af­ter spend­ing much of his life in the ser­vice of the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Labour Par­ty, a scant 33 months in of­fice must have seemed a cru­el­ly trun­cat­ed re­ward for keep­ing faith in his dreams for so long.

But the loss of the Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter runs deep­er than par­ty or even coun­try. David Thomp­son rep­re­sent­ed a new gen­er­a­tion of ed­u­cat­ed, thought­ful re­gion­al politi­cians who re­mained faith­ful to their coun­try of birth while cham­pi­oning caus­es and de­vel­op­ment that cut across racial, class and so­cial bound­aries. The loss of his pass­ing–to his fam­i­ly, his coun­try and to the re­gion, is the loss of a fine com­pas­sion­ate mind, poised to re­alise the rich po­ten­tial won in a life­time of po­lit­i­cal, le­gal and so­cial en­gage­ment. Rest in peace, David Thomp­son and may your com­mit­ted ex­am­ple serve to in­spire oth­er young Caribbean pro­fes­sion­als.