SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — He is the prime minister’s father, but Morris Holness has no difficulties whatsoever discussing his own political leanings or the fact that he has never ever voted for his son’s party, the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

In fact, Michael Manley, the now late iconic leader of the People’s National Party (PNP) in the 1970s, was greatly admired by the elder Holness, which is how his son Andrew Michael Holness — born in 1972 the year Manley came to political power with the message ‘Better must come’ — got his middle name.

The elder Holness says that on every occasion in the past when he has voted he has put his X beside the PNP’s Head, apart from those occasions including 2007 “when I don’t vote because I don’t like how PNP getting on…”

But with parliamentary elections now in the air with his son as prime minister and at the helm of JLP, Morris Holness says he is getting ready to support his boy “100 per cent”, though he insists that he is “not a Labourite, not a PNP either…”

Holness, who describes his own political philosophy as that of a Christian Social Democrat, says he will vote in support of his son because he is confident the 39-year-old will lead Jamaica in the right direction.

Morris Holness says that in principle he is supportive of “any party that I see is moving in the direction of caring about the people, narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. People must be fed, people must have work, people must have good health care…

‘It can’t be about a few people up the top calling themselves the government, it is government by the people, of the people, and this is what I am looking forward to now,” he said.

“There should be participation of the people in the government, not a few people making decisions on behalf of the people. Listen to what the people have to say, get them to move with you, unite the people and this is the only way we can go forward as a nation, no party business, but unite the people and I personally believe Andrew is in a position to do this job,” says Holness.

He candidly recalls how he first became supportive of democratic socialism which Manley — whom he describes as “a great guy, great man” — fervently advocated in the 1970s.

Holness says that he actually became a convert to democratic socialism in the late 1960s, long before Manley publicly embraced the philosophy with much fanfare in 1974.

He remembers that the “bauxite company” requested of his school Munro for a student who specialised in agriculture to oversee the company’s dairy farm at Pepper. Munro did not, at the time, offer a formal programme in agricultural science, but the young Morris Holness had completed such a stint a few years earlier at Clarendon College. He was recommended and accepted by the bauxite company.

“I had to supervise workers there and we worked so hard with the little bit of pay… I started to watch the system from that time. I had a book on the ‘isms’ and I read up and I went through and came up on democratic socialism and read through it, compared it with areas in the Bible and said this system should serve the people better…,” he says.

He regrets that Manley’s democratic socialism did not work because of what he felt was the strong “freeness mentality” among the Jamaican people and the reality that the “system was not favoured by our powerful neighbours…”

“The system was under pressure all along,” he says.

Born April 30, 1946, Morris Odean Delano Holness, the son of a farmer and a teacher, grew up in the South East St Elizabeth community of Myersville before moving a couple of miles north to Goshen because of bauxite mining operations.

His high school education came at Clarendon College and Munro College before moving on to the University of the West Indies St Augustine campus in Trinidad & Tobago where he studied Agricultural Science. Holness says he was unable to complete the course because of ill-health and returned home after two years.

He would return to university subsequently, but switched from the natural sciences to the social sciences, eventually completing a degree in Management Studies.

He laughingly says the degree has never been properly utilised by him since he was never able to tear himself away from agriculture and farming, which he has loved since childhood.

“I always knew I would be a farmer, my father was a farmer,” he says.

It was while managing a farm in St Catherine belonging to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ripton Macpherson, that he first met and developed a romantic relationship with Andrew’s mother, Sonia Harvey.

“She was my first real girlfriend,” says a smiling Holness. “We were to have got married but it didn’t come through in the end (but) we always get on well, mi good friend, we get on well…,” he adds.

He credits Harvey for the work she did in raising their son. “I did my best, but his mother did most because he lived with her, she was the one,” he says.

Much of his input came during the holidays when Andrew would come to St Elizabeth to spend time.

Morris Holness says his son showed an affinity for the hard work on 25 acres of farm lands at Goshen and Pepper.

The farm included livestock — cattle, goats, pigs and poultry — as well as mixed crops such as pumpkins, corn, cassava, scotch bonnet peppers and sorrel for Christmas.

The elder Holness recalls that his son “didn’t do well with the pigs… not everyone can manage pigs” so he assigned him to other tasks, including crop spraying.

He also found that the boy was “good with his hands” so he assigned him to tasks such as carpentry to repair farm buildings.

A soft-spoken man with a sense of humour, Holness, a divorcee with six children, strikes a consistent note of moderation.

He is a “strong believer in God” but “not much of a church man” though he “walks” with the church in his “heart”.

He enjoys “a drink now and again”, though not as much as he used to because of a stomach ailment.

Long ago, he says, he discovered the medicinal qualities of Jamaican rum. Sick with flu and in danger of not being able to complete his exams, the school nurse provided a dosage of “the devil’s soup” mixed with syrup.

That experience had taught him to “always keep a bottle of white rum handy because it’s medicine”.

Asked about his tail-wagging dogs which constantly swarm around him licking at his hands, Holness attributes it to his proximity to nature.

“I am a nature person, all living things — plants and animals — I seem to have a knack with,” he explains.

“Animals gravitate to me, somebody else’s dog will get sick and walk into my yard for assistance. I have seen it over and over and that is the way it has been for a long time. I am a nature person. I have a management degree but I haven’t used it, I have stayed on the farm, number one I am claustrophobic, so I can’t stay lock up in a building for a whole day, I stay out on the farm,” he says.