PRIME Minister P J Patterson is expected today to formally appoint Bishop Herro Blair as Jamaica’s political ombudsman, senior government sources said last night.

Patterson is scheduled to make the announcement during a parliamentary statement, the sources said.

“I hear a name being called and can’t say it’s not true,” one of the government sources told the Observer during a telephone interview last night.

Blair, 56, an evangelical preacher and community activist, gained a high-profile in the late 1970s when he railed against the then democratic socialist regime of the late Michael Manley, which many in the fundamentalist church claimed was taking Jamaica into communism. In the highly-charged ideological environment of the time, Blair was characterised by the left as a supporter of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and its leader, Edward Seaga.

In the 1980s, Blair expanded his ministry through his Deliverance Centre on Waltham Park Road, thereby broadening his constituency. He dabbled directly in politics in the mid-1990s when he became the first chairman of the National Democratic Movement (NDM) after it was formed by Bruce Golding, who had walked out of the JLP, giving up his powerful post of chairman to form the new party.

But Blair, during his relatively short stint in the post, was able to keep above the partisan political fray and was early this year named chairman of the Peace Management Initiative, a group that was formed to mediate an end to “inter- and intra-community” violence.

Blair, as political ombudsman, will police the code of conduct by which the major political parties have agreed to abide during the campaign for the general elections. An upgraded code was signed in May by Patterson, the president of the ruling People’s National Party and Seaga.

During the last two general elections, Jamaica’s political ombudsman was retired judge Justice James Kerr.

Kerr’s job, however, largely fell into abeyance once the ombudsman law was overtaken by the Public Defender Act, which incorporated the role of the public defender and the parliamentary ombudsman.

The post is being reactivated after the parties agreed the code needed to be specifically policed and that the job would not properly fall to the public defender.