Joan Gordon-Webley, the firebrand Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) politician best remembered for the bitterly fought 1980 election campaign in which her PNP opponent, Roy McGann, was controversially killed by police, is back.

After nearly a decade away from the gritty street politics of Jamaica, Gordon-Webley has quickly reclaimed her place on the political landscape with a series of strident comments, for which her critics have dubbed her “lost in time”.

Gordon-Webley, whose political toughness belies her pretty face, personal charm and petite form, has her eyes set on winning the South East St Andrew constituency currently held by the People’s National Party’s Maxine Henry-Wilson, the education minister.

“My reason for being back here is my love of Bruce Golding (the JLP leader), but mostly my love of this country,” she says.

“It was my intention to come back and to give my vast experience to the party on a whole, but I was persuaded that this particular constituency needs a special person, and I have fallen in love with South East St Andrew.”

She returned to Jamaica only in May, after eventful stints in Grenada and a short stay in Trinidad and Tobago, but wasted no time in grabbing the spotlight, following last week’s flare-up of violence in troubled communities off Mountain View Avenue, St Andrew.

In an interview carried Friday in the Daily Observer, Gordon-Webley accused Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller of inciting the latest round of violence, and referred to an alleged communist plot within the PNP to destabilise the area.

The allegations drew the ire of the PNP hierarchy and resulted in the PNP requesting that a peace walk planned for later that day be postponed.

Critics also cited Gordon-Webley’s Communist theory as a throw-back to the past, particularly the 1970s, and evidence that she was out of touch with Jamaican reality.

The 1970s were dominated by an intensely fought ideological battle between the Democratic Socialist PNP led by late Prime Minister Michael Manley and the conservative pro-United States JLP led by Edward Seaga.

The JLP argued that Jamaica would go Communist if Manley’s PNP was re-elected, and spoke of a plan by the Marxist-Leninist Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ), then led by Dr Trevor Munroe, to oust Manley from power.

Political violence associated with the ideological tussle claimed the lives of a reported 800 persons in 1980. The JLP won the October 30 elections that year, trouncing the PNP by 51 seats to nine, the worst ever beating of a political party in Jamaica.

Gordon-Webley, then relatively new to politics, won the East Rural St Andrew seat after a tough campaign that was marred by the police killing of PNP candidate Roy McGann in Gordon Town on the eve of the elections.

But in 1989, the PNP, with a reformed Manley again at the helm, grabbed back political power from the JLP. Manley had abandoned the tell-tale Kareba suit for the jacket and tie, symbol of western capitalism.

Since those days, the WPJ has disbanded, Dr Munroe has become a PNP senator, and with the Cold War over, the ideological battles have all but disappeared.

But Gordon-Webley, no stranger to controversy, doesn’t seem like one to be easily fazed by the critics.

“Why is everyone getting so excited?” she asks calmly to begin the interview.

She oozes confidence – everything about her, from the fiery passion behind her candid words, to the way she strides in her 4-inch high heels – but tempers that confidence with sugary charm.

On Thursday, for our interview, Gordon-Webley is smartly dressed in a beige skirt suit, but it’s her shoes that stand out.

“I love shoes! That’s my weakness,” she admits. “People say this and that about Imelda Marcos (of The Philippines) and about her thousands of shoes, but I have no problem with her. That woman knew what she was up to,” she laughs, showing off the gold sparkles and paisley pattern of her heels.

Not only has she fallen in love with South East St Andrew, from which she plans her comeback, but from her own account, the constituency is beginning to love her back. That, she says, is the root of all the current contention now embroiling the area.

But Gordon-Webley is unrepentant in her pointing the finger of blame, insisting that the violence has nothing to do with her.

“Our internal polls show me way ahead of Maxine, why would I want to disrupt that? They are getting excited because this is a constituency that has only been held once by the JLP, so naturally it is a constituency that the PNP believes is one of their strongholds.

“To my mind, the constituency has totally been left neglected by our present member of parliament, and all that has happened is that I have stepped into the constituency,” she explains.

She accuses Henry-Wilson of holding “the people in contempt”, saying she does not deserve to sit in the House of Representatives.

“She honestly doesn’t believe that people need representation,” Gordon-Webley charges, claiming that the sitting MP did not avail herself to the people. To underscore her charge, she points out that since 2002, her opponent has not had an operational constituency office for citizens to visit her.

“Where does she expect people will go for that representation? You can’t go to her ministry, that’s where ministry business is done, not constituency business. I think it is indecent for Maxine Henry-Wilson to continue to collect money monthly and not represent the people. To be a constituency representative and not even have a constituency office is scandalous!” she declares.

(Checks by the Sunday Observer revealed that Henry-Wilson does have a constituency office, located at the corner of Hopefield Avenue and Lady Musgrave Road, but which has only been operational, according to PNP deputy general secretary Julian Robinson, “for a few weeks”.)

Gordon-Webley says that since she entered the constituency, the JLP has opened three constituency offices, and it is the intense on-the-ground mobilisation that she has started that has spurred her opponents into action.

“When I knock on people’s doors they smile and laugh and say: ‘Mrs Webley, you have done what we have not been able to do. For the last four years we have not seen Maxine Henry-Wilson except on television, but all of a sudden, since you have come into the constituency, she has been running around like a chicken without its head, coming to knock doors asking for support.’ That is what is happening.”

Gordon-Webley is relying on her battle-hardened experience on the campaign trail to help her bring home the seat. Prior to winning the East Rural St Andrew seat in 1980, the JLP had asked her to ‘warm’ the West Central St Andrew seat of Ferdinand Yap, who was detained under the State of Emergency along with other prominent JLP leaders in 1976. She got involved in politics, she says, because of the injustices she witnessed being meted out during that election campaign.

Gordon-Webley was born in Hanover but raised in England, returned to Jamaica to live in 1972, the year Manley led the PNP to a crushing defeat of Hugh Shearer’s JLP.

Between that time and the 1980 elections, she worked in the private sector, but ended up becoming involved in social outreach work through the Kingston Jaycees.

It was while working for one of the Jaycees’ projects, called ‘Clothe The People’. that she experienced a life-defining moment, she recalls.

One day while working in the South St Andrew community of Rema, she says she witnessed scores of people being chased out of the community and their homes bulldozed.

“People’s stuff were being thrown from the top floors of high-rise buildings, over the banisters, onto the ground. People were virtually screaming and running in fear. Tony Spaulding (former PNP housing minister) had sent down the bulldozers, and they were chasing the people out,” she says.

Her anger was inflamed, she says, by Michael Manley who, she alleges, came to Rema to empathise with the people, but later that day made an about-face.

“He promised the people that he would make right the wrong that his minister had committed. But lo and behold, the very night on television, I saw Michael Manley saying something totally different from what he had said on the ground. I was so incensed. He was making excuses, and he basically wanted to deny this had happened. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Her anger led her to the doors of the JLP, and into the office of the then general-secretary, Bruce Golding. She says that after speaking with her for just a few minutes, Golding gave her a task that redirected the course of her life.

“He sprang out of his seat and picked up a file. He gave it to me and said: ‘You see this file? This file is a list of polling division workers in the constituency of West Central St Andrew. Go in there, find these people, endear yourself to them, and keep them close to the Jamaica Labour Party, because God knows, they have been battered, and are in need of a friend’,” Gordon-Webley remembers.

When Yap was released, Golding redirected Gordon-Webley to East Rural St Andrew, where she won the seat and held it for two terms under a JLP government. She tasted defeat in 1989, losing to Oliver Clue, but was named an Opposition senator by Seaga.

Gordon-Webley was among several JLP personalities, including the current leader Golding, who left to form the National Democratic Movement (NDM), at the height of a fall-out with Seaga.

She was elected a vice-president of the fledgling NDM in 1995, but she migrated before the 1997 general elections and dropped from the local political radar, later turning up in Grenada, where she served as advisor to Grenadian Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell.

Her stint there as well was coloured by controversy, with Mitchell’s opponents accusing her of interfering in their internal politics.

But she was credited with helping Mitchell to score two consecutive electoral victories.

She also served as executive director of the Caribbean Democratic Union, an affiliate of the International Democratic Union, a movement spawned during the height of the Cold War by conservative world leaders, including Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan.

After leaving Grenada, she served a short stint in Trinidad and Tobago as the head of a scholarship-hunting company that also prepared teenage students for the SAT exams.

In the meantime, Golding rejoined the JLP in 2002, followed by some of the others who had departed with him.

She’s now back on the scene, Gordon-Webley says, to make sure the man she believes is best to lead Jamaica actually gets a chance to do so.

The experiences she has garnered, she says, have heightened her political maturity, and armed her with the skills she believes are needed to transform the constituency.

“There is a lack of education, massive unemployment, and there is absolutely nothing for the youth to do. We have to put their idle hands to work. I am going to show them that there is a better way,” adds Gordon-Webley.

Some of her plans, she explains, involve using the support she has gained from her corporate Jamaica-based ‘management team’ to continue and expand social programmes that mostly focus on education.

“Our councillor/caretaker for the Vineyard Town division, Fernando Spencer, who works at the University Library, has brought in a group of students from UWI, and they have taken on preparing children for GSAT,” she discloses.

The mother of two grown women, one 35, one 23, and of five grandchildren, Gordon-Webley says her life is exactly the way she wants it. One daughter lives in Australia, but four of the grandchildren live in Jamaica, which, she says, makes her especially glad to be home.

“This summer I had the wonderful experience of taking my 17-year-old granddaughter to university for the first time. She is what you’d call a gifted child,” she says beaming with pride.

And of a significant other? “I’ve been a widow for 19 years,” is all she would allow, a reference to the tragic death of her husband, the Jamaica Defence Force Captain Glen Webley, a former JLP politician, who was found dead in his car on the Palisadoes Road. campbello@jamaicaobserver.com