There are no cameras around, but in what seems to be a movie scene – even if not from one of those old westerns in which the sheriff features prominently – K D Knight shoots down Duke Street in his brand new sports car on a cool summer afternoon.

The 66-year-old lawyer and former politician, who earned a reputation for being able to provide a good sound bite on any given day, just moments before had instructed, “Bring the car around” into his office telephone, had gone downstairs, hopped into the “cute little thing” and sped off to meet a long-lost relative uptown.

“Right now, I just bought meself a sports car,” Knight said earlier, near the conclusion of a two-hour conversation. “A Benz SLK 200. You know them? Just bought it… it’s convertible – press my thing, the top comes back, press my thing,” Knight said, seeming to be still entranced by the vehicle. “I was gonna buy a Corvette, but I changed my mind.”

In a discussion that spanned what he perceives to be his flaws, achievements and passions, the Sunday Observer sat with Knight on the occasion of his exit from representational politics, about 20 years after having entered.

“There must be so many (flaws) that they might be difficult to enumerate,” he said. He named a few, however.

“People say I’m arrogant. I’m not arrogant. If you know me, you know I’m not. It’s a perception,” he said. “If you’re talking rubbish, it’s difficult for me to tidy it up, pretty it up, put a ribbon around it and say how profound your words have been. Rubbish is rubbish. I think I got this reputation from journalists. A journalist would come to interview me totally unprepared… and I would tend sometimes to be brusque and then they would say I’m arrogant.

“Another one (flaw) is ah try to be cool, but sometimes ah lose me cool and I may go a bit overboard in responding when I lose my cool. If it is a fault, I have it. But I am forthright. If I believe that this is a pen. I must say it is a pen.”

Knight’s achievements in public service are many, and include piloting the establishment of the Victim Support Unit and the Rape Unit, which later became the Centre for Investigation of Sexual Offences and Carnal Abuse, while he was minister of national security.

Knight said, however, that he was on “overtime” in politics, plus he had decided that he would leave the game the same time as former prime minister PJ Patterson.

“I’m free… no longer an MP, so I’m immersed now in my law practice,” he said.

Since this interview, however, Knight was named an Opposition senator and as such will remain involved in the legislative arm of government.

Knight’s ‘bondage’, as it were, began in 1976 when he became involved in the campaign of the late Ferdie Neita in East Central St Catherine.

In 1983, Knight became the chairman of the constituency, which automatically meant he would become the candidate. He was elected member of parliament in 1989.

One of the highlights of his early political life, however, was his involvement in student politics at Howard University in the United States.

“Those were the days of Black Power and I was then a real advocate for Black Power… and I really saw the marginalisation of black people and I saw black people fighting to be in the mainstream,” he said. “On the campus, that fight was also evident, and so I became heavily involved with that.”

Knight went on to serve for an unprecedented two terms as president of the Caribbean Students’ Association, and later co-founded the Jamaican Nationals Association in Washington, DC.

“I was also in this whole process trying to advance the image of the Caribbean person on the Howard Campus and beyond in the wider Washington Metropolitan Area,” Knight said.

Upon his return to Jamaica, after having also completed law studies in the United Kingdom, Knight rekindled his family association with the People’s National Party (PNP) and his own belief in the philosophy of Norman Manley, in whose office he had worked after leaving high school.

Even though Knight said he became a politician by “circumstance” and “expectation”, he feels that through a strategy of encouraging the constituents of East Central St Catherine – whom he represented for four terms – to focus on building their communities, he was successful in effecting some change.

“At the end of the day, there are still things that I would have liked to have been able to achieve, but still in terms of schools, in terms of education, in terms of community centres, in terms of basic schools, I think we did quite well, and in terms of a health centre, police station, post office and those kinds of areas that provide social necessities.”

Regardless of his unplanned course into the world of representational politics, Knight became a politician who was often in the news. In 2006, during the PNP’s presidential race, he was again under the spotlight for intimating that the eventual victor, Portia Simpson Miller, was not bright enough for the job.

But Knight has since insisted that bad interpretations followed his comments, some of them making it seem as though he thought Simpson Miller was incapable because she was a woman.

“I said when persons ask me qualifications of each, I say Dr Peter Phillips PhD, I say Dr Omar Davies PhD, I say Dr Karl Blythe, medical doctor and I say, Comrade Portia, so and so and there was a pregnant pause. That was interpreted to mean that I said that you have to have a PhD to be prime minister,” he explained.

“The one criticism that I smile about to myself, that some other comment was anti-woman, I said to myself, when people don’t know your background, don’t know you, they say all sort of rubbish,” Knight said.

He said it was under his tenure as minister of national security that a woman rose to the rank of assistant commissioner in the police force and more women graduated from the police academy.

He believes he applied himself fully in his ministerial assignments as well, including the “difficult” Ministry of National Security.

“No administration has really been able to put a lock on violent crimes,” he argued. “My God, I don’t know. I tried to send a message that it was a societal problem and that the political directorate alone couldn’t solve it. When I sent that message, (at) first the news people were all over me.”

But what he cites as his success with his ministerial portfolios, he said, was due to the fact that he always read, researched and was always prepared for anything.

“I read everything that was presented to me as minister and I went beyond, and I also thought it was a very important thing to do some research, so I spent hours on my computer in my study because I wanted to see how other societies with similar problems treated with the problems in order to arrive at solutions. And then, to see where those solutions could be adapted to our circumstances and I felt the necessity always to be prepared,” he said.

While he didn’t want to be “too pointed” to say ministers don’t read or do research, Knight said “every minister ought to see the necessity of being fully and totally prepared,” adding that some ministers insult officials by not reading documents which have been painstakingly prepared.

As minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade, Knight presided over several international committees, including the UN Security Council, a position he was “pleased and honoured” to hold.

He also served as president of the council of ministers of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group; and as chair of the community council of ministers in Caricom, among other things.

“I’m pleased that I was the first minister to lead a ministerial delegation to the conflict-ridden continent of Africa, and in particular to Sudan in 2004,” Knight said.

On the subject of passions, three major ones stand out: the law, family and gardening. Then there are hunting and cricket.

“I’ve been yearning over these years to get back to my practice of law,” he disclosed. “It’s a first love, you know.

“I once said, and was misquoted too, that the one time the law should allow one to kick a man is if he’s accused of being corrupt and he’s not. What does one have besides one’s character and reputation? Those are important things to the human being. What you are and what you are seen to be.” Knight has three grandchildren, a daughter and a son recently deceased.

“I am a doting father and moreso a doting grandfather. When I’m not working here, I nowadays have more time to spend with my family and I do so. And I am into gardening. I have a reasonable-sized premises.”

He grows five varieties of grass, flowers, and has a vegetable garden with peppers and cucumber, but “the broccoli didn’t come to anything”.

“I have a problem at home in that my wife says I’m crazy, she might be right, because I have planted a noni tree, two lychee, a cashew tree, star apple tree and those are in addition to what I have there now – sweet sop, custard apple, mango, breadfruit, lime and pear. She’s saying the place is going to be a forest and I say to her ‘Listen, when you and the grannies are there picking the fruits, you will remember when grandpa planted it’.”