WESTMORELAND, Jamaica — People’s National Party (PNP) candidate for Westmoreland Western, Ian Hayles, has attributed an unexpected turnout of supporters on the road for the delay in keeping his scheduled appointment to be nominated Monday morning.

He was scheduled to be nominated anywhere between 10:00 and 10:45 am. However, he arrived way beyond the scheduled time and was nominated at 12:45 pm.

“The delay is quite simple. I think whenever there is a swing to a particular political party, one can expect that people just join in. The crowd that we had prepared for, we got double that amount. It prevented us somewhat from our first point in terms of Negril much earlier. So, that causes a delay,” Hayles told the media in response to queries from the Jamaica Observer.

In the 2020 general election, he lost his Hanover Western seat to then first-time politician, Tamika Davis, who ran on a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) ticket.

Meanwhile, JLP standard bearer Dr Garfield James, who was scheduled to be nominated anywhere between 11:30 and 12:15 am Monday, arrived a few minutes ago at the Gordon Hall nomination centre in Grange Hill. He replaced first-term MP Morland Wilson, who won the seat on a JLP ticket in 2020 with 6,148 votes to the PNP’s Dr Wykeham McNeill’s 5,095 votes.

One unexpected independent candidate, Bilbert Lancaster James, was nominated at 10:20 am while a representative of the Jamaica Progressive Party (JPP), Bertland Madden, was nominated at 12:20 pm.

— Anthony Lewis