Peter Phillips’ supporters do not believe that he is any danger of being ousted from the vice-presidential ranks of the People’s National Party, but concede that their man’s ambition to lead the party could take a short-term psychological blow from Paul Burke’s 11th-hour decision, a week ago, to vie for one of the PNP’s four vice-president slots.

“In the last election for vice-presidents, Dr Phillips emerged second to Portia Simpson Miller,” explained an official of the Phillips campaign.

“With Paul Burke in the race and the possibility of an alliance between, say, Portia Simpson Miller and Karl Blythe to give votes, Peter could find himself slipping in the vote count, and some people are likely to raise questions about his viability for the leadership of the party. There are strategic moves at play.”

Simpson Miller’s handlers were unavailable at the weekend to comment on the likely alliances in the vice-presidential vote as part of the strategic manoeuvrings in the run-up for the PNP’s top job.

But Blythe, who himself has aspirations to the party’s presidency, seemed last week to hint at an emerging pact between himself and Simpson Miller, although he had previously discounted such an alliance to the Sunday Observer.

“When you look at the delegates’ count, as long as Portia is supporting Blythe and Blythe supporting Portia it is unlikely that we will be kicked out of the four (sitting vice-presidents),” Blythe said.

In that regard, he said, he is least likely to be hurt by Burke’s late entry into the race, the vote for which will take place on Saturday.

“.To me, Burke entering could mean my stepping up from fourth (in the delegate votes) maybe . to second. I could go up the ladder. I don’t think it could affect me negatively – maybe positively, but not negatively,” said Blythe.

When the PNP last voted for its vice-presidents in September 2003, Simpson Miller, the populist MP who has the local government portfolio in Prime Minister P J Patterson’s Cabinet, got the most votes – 1,466. This was 99 more than the 1,367 votes that were received by Phillips.

Paul Robertson, the development minister who had played a major role in engineering the PNP’s victory to a fourth consecutive term in office, got 1,252 votes, seven more than the number received by Blythe.

Things are different now. Patterson, who turns 70 in a few months’ time, has made it clear that he will not lead the party into another general election and it is expected that he will step down before the end of this year, possibly by the time the PNP holds its 67th annual conference in September.

Simpson Miller and Phillips, the front-runners, as well as Blythe, are declared contenders for Patterson’s job. Burke, too, is in the race to be PNP president, although he says he does not want to be prime minister. The other declared contenders are the finance minister, Omar Davies, and the party’s chairman Robert Pickersgill.

So although PNP insiders stress that the outcome of the vice-presidential contest, including the stacking of the votes, can hardly be used as a template for the election to succeed Patterson, they agree that candidates can get a boost by performing well on Saturday.

This is, apparently, what has made the Phillips camp suspicious of Burke’s entry into the race at the last minute, having been nominated from the floor during the PNP’s abbreviated annual conference a week ago.

The conference had been postponed from last September because of the damage caused by Hurricane Ivan which struck Jamaica only a week before the PNP session. The script for last Saturday’s conference was to return the sitting vice-presidents en bloc while the conference concentrated on general house-keeping business.

But things were thrown into turmoil when a Burke supporter named Randy Mair nominated Burke. Unprepared for the contest, the PNP bigwigs huddled and were able to put through a compromise to delay the vote for a fortnight.

Something else has caused Phillips’ handlers to see a Machiavellian hand in the Burke move. Over the past year the PNP has been tightening the rules so as to eliminate constituency paper groups, formed and kept financial solely to give MPs and constituency leaders power bases.

The upshot is that from over 3,000 delegates in two years, only 1,600 were eligible to attend last week’s conference. Peter Phillips’ East St Central St Andrew constituency was among those that has to be re-organising itself to ensure that its groups meet the criteria of the party’s central office.

This meant that only 45 delegates were eligible for the conference from Phillips’ constituency, compared to 145 from Simpson Miller’s Southwest St Andrew and 167 for Blythe’s riding of Central Westmoreland.

“When the new delegates’ list is ready, compared to the one that will be used for the September conference, Phillips will have 129 delegates and Simpson 145 and Blythe will likely remain at his existing numbers,” said a source close to the Phillips campaign.

“The new configuration will give Phillips more clout. But at present, with five candidates running and the possibility of an alliance between Blythe and Simpson Miller, they can urge their delegates to vote strategically for candidates other than Phillips so as to hurt Phillips,” this source added.

It is a strategic formulation clearly appreciated by Blythe, the former water and housing minister who was forced to leave the Cabinet in 2002 after an inquiry by retired civil servant Erwin Angus pointed to corruption and mismanagement in a government shelter project called Operation PRIDE.

Blythe, however, has been attempting to claw his way back with the support of a legalistic exculpatory review of the Angus report by a retired solicitor general, Dr Ken Rattray, who died recently.

In the 2003 race, Blythe said last week that he, in the end, had a handful of votes fewer than Robertson “even though I gave him 200 (delegate votes)”.

This time, though, it is unlikely that either Blythe or Simpson Miller would consider urging their delegates to vote for Robertson, who is heading Phillips’ campaign for the party presidency. The natural beneficiary, therefore, would be Burke.

But Burke yesterday dismissed that he was a part of any such alliance or that his entry in the race will specifically hurt Phillips or any other candidate. “If you are a Peter supporter you are going to vote for Peter and you (still) have three other votes,” Burke said.

In any event, he argued, Phillips would remain a vice president – a point on which the Phillips camp does not disagree. What they fear is that a weakened showing by their man, if he finds himself in the cross-hairs of a two or three-way alliance, may cause some to question his viability for the top post.

Such issues do not arise for him, according to Burke.

“My motivation is that I believe we have a political agenda to advance. My running is to strengthen that political agenda. It is not to target anyone, any individual. That has never been our consideration. That’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he said.

Added Burke: “I have no hidden agenda, there is no subterfuge, there is no intrigue, there is no alliance. I have a political agenda.”