There is a story sometimes told by old enemies of Edward Seaga in trying to sum up his personality.

It is about a television interview that was supposed to have been given by the late criminal lawyer and one-time chairman of the Jamaica Labour Party, Ian Ramsay, with whom Seaga had a falling out.

Ramsay, having painted an unflattering picture of Seaga’s leadership style, the story goes, was asked by the interviewer: “So who likes Mr Seaga?”

Ramsay, it is said, eased back in his chair for a long moment, contemplating the question. Then he said: “Perhaps his mother. Just perhaps.”

Although many people know the story, it has been impossible to find anyone who actually saw the interview or that particular episode of Ramsay’s performance.

But this sums up what is clearly a popular perception of Edward Seaga, the embattled leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, who, over three decades, has fought off all challenges to his hold – some say dominance – of the JLP. He has been branded cold, stubborn, authoritarian, spiteful and ruthless. There usually though, is concession that he is bright and efficient.

But for those who know Edward Seaga, this is hardly the measure of the man. Indeed, a much softer, more complex picture of Seaga emerges from a quarter from which it would be hardly expected.

Indeed, John Maxwell could hardly be described as a Seaga fan. Both men have locked horns for over 40 years and Maxwell, who represented the People’s National Party to challenge Seaga for the West Kingston constituency, has been among the JLP leader’s harshest critics in the press.

Yet, Maxwell describes Seaga as a man who more often than not is “playing a part scripted for him by someone else”.

“He seems to me to have been a shy man, pretending – like many journalists – to be a hard-bitten man of the world. He’s not the cold, calculating character most people think he is,” Maxwell, an outspoken journalist, told the Sunday Observer.

Added Maxwell: “In politics, as in journalism, you often – not always – have to pretend to be tougher than you really are. Unfortunately, I think Seaga has always overplayed his part, mistaking ruthlessness for decisiveness and bragadoccio for self-assurance. And this is because he has always been insecure and unsure of how people see him.”

Seaga’s personality was again thrust into public scrutiny this month when Labour Party officials and political analysts questioned his moral authority to lead the party after it emerged that his hotel operating firm – Town & Country Resorts, which he put up for liquidation last August – was $443 million in the red. The news raised questions about whether he would be able to pay creditors.

Town & Country’s liabilities, Seaga expects, will be cleared from the excess of the assets which he says will be realised after the liquidation of another of his firms, Premium Investments Ltd.

As the controversy swirled over his leadership, Seaga called an emergency Friday night meeting of the JLP’s 26-member parliamentary group and its 70-member Standing Committee on January 9.

He told his colleagues that nothing had changed in his financial affairs since last August when he put the companies up for liquidation after the United Kingdom Privy Council ruled that Town & Country was responsible for $155 million in general consumption tax, inclusive of penalties and interest, which was not paid over to the Government.

Seaga asked the meeting for a confidence vote, claiming that some members of the party were using the air of uncertainty surrounding his financial status to unseat him.

At the end of the meeting, the party issued a statement saying that Seaga still enjoyed their full confidence “and has not, in any way, lost the moral authority to continue as leader of the Opposition”.

But JLP insiders told the Sunday Observer that the support for Seaga, at least in the parliamentary party, was not conclusive and that, in fact, the 73-year-old Opposition leader was basically on borrowed time.

“As a consensus we decided that we would allow him to continue as leader of the opposition for now,” one insider, who described Seaga as a “night watchman”, told the Sunday Observer.

With the uncertainty of full support for his leadership still dogging him, Seaga, last Tuesday, called a meeting of his parliamentary group, this time to settle the question of his continued leadership of the Opposition.

The result was a big vote in his favour from 17 of the party’s 21 members of parliament. Seaga welcomed the outcome, saying that he never had any doubt about the level of support he was receiving from his colleagues.

The size of the victory, if not the victory itself, surprised some political analysts, coming as it did only months after a series of setbacks by the Opposition leader. First, James Robertson and Dr Horace Chang defied him and ran for deputy leaders’ post in the JLP, beating pro-Seaga incumbents, Olivia “Babsy” Grange and Edmund Bartlett.

Then there was his accusation that Robertson had financed his campaign with “tainted money”, a claim from which Seaga had to quickly back away because it angered party financiers. Soon followed a series of internal elections for key party posts which people on the so-called reform wing of the JLP won, beating mostly people considered to be Seaga acolytes.

The conclusion among analysts was that the JLP parliamentarians who opposed Seaga remained fearful for their political future if Seaga survived the vote and their dissent became public

Indeed, in the past dozen years Seaga had crushed two substantial rebellions against his leadership – the so-called Gang of Five incident in the early 1990s and the so-called Western 11 uprising in the middle of that decade led to a major split in the JLP and the eventual departure of then chairman, Bruce Golding to form the National Democratic Movement, until his return in 2002. Moreover, in the three decades since he has led the JLP, Seaga, his critics say, have dispatched several well-known JLP figures.

According to journalist Anthony Abrahams a substantial part of the bloodletting in the JLP during Seaga’s tenure has been because of his discomfort with bright men around him.

That, according to Abrahams, who was a member of Seaga’s cabinet in the 1980s, is the JLP leader’s greatest weakness. “.He’s intimidated by bright men, but not bright women,” Abrahams, who co-hosts the morning radio talk show, The Breakfast Club, said, adding that Seaga “depends on able women”.

Political historian, Troy Caine, named Gloria Knight, Corrine McLarty, Joyce Robinson, Jeanette Grant-Woodham, Joan Webley and Olivia “Babsy” Grange, as some of the women whom he said “rose to power” during the years Seaga was prime minister.

Seaga’s “greatest incapacity”, Abrahams added, “is his inability to develop and allow young leaders around him to grow”.

Others agree. According to one JLP insider who asked not to be named, this trait is probably what drives hatred for Seaga within the JLP.

“He demoted people and some are still carrying feelings for him,” the insider said. “You either love him or don’t. There is no middle ground.”

To Caine, though, one of Seaga’s more endearing qualities is that he “stubbornly stands for principle”.

Abrahams agreed, describing the JLP leader as a disciplined, organised and resolute man with a passion for preserving Jamaican culture.

“He’s highly organised, some say too organised,” Abrahams said. He also assessed Seaga as “not very bright in the sense of Norman Manley, Michael Manley, Hugh Shearer or Robert Lightbourne, but more organised”.

Caine, who could be considered a Seaga loyalist, had one basic criticism of Seaga – “he tends to be a loose cannon”.

In fact, Seaga’s penchant to shoot from the hip has, on more than one occasion, sparked public fury that more than likely has fed some of the dislike for him.

In the early 1990s, for instance, in a caustic attack on the Government’s performance generally, he likened the administration to a woman lying on her back with her legs spread open.

The remark infuriated the public and women’s rights groups in particular.

But Seaga weathered that and other storms generated by his comments, just as how he has been able to survive political challenges.

“He is a survivor, both politically and otherwise,” said Caine, a man who has witnessed many of Seaga’s leadership battles within the JLP.

One such occasion was in January 1979 when Seaga, saying that he was not getting the type of support he needed as leader, resigned the post.

“.To the extent that certain persons either do not fully participate or sap their strength in inter-personal problems, the party loses their co-operation and the effectiveness of the leadership suffers”, Seaga said at the time. “It is against this background that I have taken the regretted decision to resign.”

It was a ploy he again used in the mid-1980s when he was prime minister and apparently dissatisfied with criticism within the party. He announced that he would step down as party leader and serve out his period as prime minister. It didn’t happen. There was an outpouring of demand that he stay.

There was a variation of the strategy ahead of Seaga taking the leadership of the JLP replacing Hugh Shearer, who had lost support in the party after losing the general election of 1972 to Michael Manley’s PNP. Many insiders say that Seaga, who had served with distinction in the JLP government of the 1960s, had set his eyes on the leadership.

In 1973, months after the JLP’s defeat, Seaga announced that he would be taking a two-year leave of absence from the party, but made it clear that it was not a resignation.

At that time, he said he was having “growing doubts” about the “effectiveness of the political process in Jamaica” and where it was leading the country.

He set a 1974 deadline on a book he was writing on the role of culture in the development strategy and said he was working on another book dealing with alternative forms of development strategies for countries such as Jamaica. He also said he intended to begin serious work on a book on Tivoli Gardens (his West Kingston stronghold) and the concept of urban restructuring.

However, by November 1974, he returned to the leadership of the JLP, securing 2,052 votes to beat his only rival, Wilton Hill, who polled 97 votes.

As Seaga inevitably draws near to the end of what has been a contradictory and often turbulent career, old critics like Maxwell see in him not only the political automaton he’s often made out to be, but “one of the political world’s most easily hurt and vulnerable people”.

Said Maxwell: “This opinion of mine seems to be borne out by his habit of always trying to discipline other people, suppressing in them the very traits which distinguish him and make him human and attractive to the people who can get close to him. Their loyalty is legendary.

“One of the saddest things about Seaga is that he never found the time to consolidate his very promising Jamaican folklore research in which, in many ways, he had a headstart on most other people. Of all the regrets he must have, I think he must most desperately rue the fact that he is not the UWI Professor Emeritus of Sociology.”