JAMAICA Labour Party (JLP) Councillor Duane Smith says that both Dr Peter Phillips and Peter Bunting have become reckless in their pursuit of leadership of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP).

Smith, who represents Chancery Hall in the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, told Sunday’s meeting of the JLP’s Area Council One (Corporate Area) that recent utterances by both aspirants for the leadership of the PNP sounded “delusional”.

“In the case of the former minister of finance and planning, Dr Peter Phillips, it would appear that, after being named Man of the Year in 2015 by sections of the media, he is now finding it very hard to believe that he is not most Jamaicans’ Man of the Year,” Smith told Labourites gathered at Sunday’s meeting held at the Scout Association of Jamaica headquarters in Kingston.

“The fact is that the recent rantings of Dr Phillips are leading us to question whether or not he is losing his mind. Because, for someone of Dr Phillips’ training and experience to be saying some of the things he has been saying recently, we have to wonder whether, as Bruce Golding (former prime minister) once asked, termites have started to infest his brain,” Smith said.

He said that Bunting, whose political aspirations he described as “unrealistic”, was sounding “even more delusional” in Parliament and on the campaign trail in responding to the report of the Commission of Enquiry into the 2010 incursion by the security forces in Tivoli Gardens.

He said he agreed with Bunting that the Jamaican people “have been fed with a litany of falsehoods about what preceded and took place during and after the operation to arrest Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, and that the report is important in establishing the historical record”. However, he could not understand Bunting’s responses to some of the findings.

Smith challenged Bunting to produce evidence that any member of the 2010 JLP administration had “tipped off” Coke about the pending extradition.

“The report of the Commission of Enquiry, which investigated the incursion, said they found no evidence of any direct communication between Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke and any Government official between August 2009 and May 2010. That was for nine months prior to the incursion,” Smith noted.

“If Bunting is saying that he has evidence that Coke was tipped of, then it would have been a dereliction of his duties as member of parliament and a Cabinet minister not to have informed the Commission about this evidence,” Smith added.

He accused the PNP of spreading lies that, following the incursion, sensitive documents were found in the office of Presidential Click, an entity run by Coke.

“The Commission says it has no evidence that any such papers were found inside Tivoli Gardens. Where are those papers which [they] said were found in Tivoli Gardens?” Smith asked.

“What we have found most distressing about Bunting’s response to the Report of the Commission, is that while he used the opportunity of speaking in the Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives on the issues…Nowhere in his speech did he refer to the fact that 69 lives were lost, and the possibility that the majority, if not all of those lives, could have been innocent persons,” Smith stated.