Manning’s wife locks door on PNM leader

OPPOSITION Leader Dr. Keith Rowley was not only prevented from seeing his predecessor Patrick Manning when he visited the San Fernando General Hospital last Tuesday but the wife of the former Prime Minister, Hazel Manning, pointedly refused to talk with him.

Rowley, who had challenged the leadership of Manning in 1996 and lost, and who was kicked out of Manning’s Cabinet in April 2008, was stopped in the corridor of the hospital by the former PM’s wife, with a hand signal, and rather than speaking with Rowley, she minutes later sent the doctor to tell the Opposition Leader that Manning was asleep and he could not visit him.

Rowley was among a number of politicians, both from within and outside the party, to visit Manning after he suffered a stroke last Monday night (January 23) and had to be rushed to the Intensive Care Unit at the San Fernando Hospital.

But while others, especially those who remained loyal to Manning following his defeat in the May 2010 general elections, such as Dr. Amery Browne, Mustapha Abdul-Hamid, Christine Kangaloo, Gary Hunt, Alicia Hospedales and others were allowed to visit Manning, Rowley was denied a visit.

According to the information reaching the Mirror, Rowley, who had arrived at the hospital around 4 p.m., surprised by the denial, thanked the doctor and said he would wait to speak personally with Mrs. Manning, with whom he had spoken earlier that morning via telephone when it was confirmed that her husband was indeed hospitalised.

According to a source close to the political leader, “Rowley stood waiting to talk with Mrs. Manning so that he could properly offer his support and sympathies to her, which seemed the human thing to do, but that never happened.”

Mirror learnt that the former PM’s wife promptly went into her husband’s room and locked the door, without so much as saying a word to Rowley, leaving him standing perplexed in the corridor.

It was also learnt that while Rowley was criticised by some for waiting “too late” to visit the ailing Manning, he had in fact telephoned Hazel Manning earlier that morning to enquire about his predecessor’s condition, but was unable to secure her permission to visit her husband.

This was seen by some within the PNM as an affront to Rowley in his role as political leader of the party of which Manning is an MP, since the family had allowed Manning’s long-standing political foe, former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, and his daughter, Mickela, a former MP for Oropouche East, to visit Manning shortly after he was admitted to the hospital.

The Manning family was also high in praise of Health Minister Dr. Fuad Khan, even though his comments to the media about Manning’s condition were very detailed and contradicted the statements being uttered by the Manning family and their spokesperson Wendy Lewis, protocol/PR officer to the former Prime Minister’s San Fernando East Constituency.

In fact while wife Hazel was telling the media last Wednesday that her husband was “recognising people” and “was attempting to get up and talk”, as reported in the Trinidad Guardian, two days after his stroke, Dr. Khan on that very same day was reported as saying that “Manning is in unstable condition.” In fact the report, dated Wednesday January 25, appeared alongside Hazel’s comments and proceeded to tell the population that Manning “is unable to speak or eat,” adding that “he is in an unstable place” and could not move the right side of his body.

To further compound the situation, Manning’s take-charge son, Brian, is reported to have slammed those “politicians who want to visit his father to score points”, which was seen as a direct missile at Rowley, since the son had gone to great lengths to publicly praise some of those politicians, past and present, from within the PNM and outside of the party who had visited his father.

“All that they have done, by their actions and their words, is to drive a bigger wedge between the two camps in the very fractured PNM, and they have not done the Manning family name any good,” one PNM insider told the TnT Mirror.

In an attempt to clarify his statements, son Brian later issued a statement condemning the Guardian article on his statement about “scoring political points,” stating that the newspaper “has intentionally twisted and misconstrued the statement I made yesterday at the San Fernando East constituency office.

“I specifically said that I was not referring to Dr. Keith Rowley, nor was I referring to former PM Basdeo Panday.”

Hazel Manning also appeared to touch on the issue when she addressed the media in a press conference last Thursday:
“There was an incident where politicians have gotten a sense that we are not happy, but that is not the case. We have never been in a situation like this and it is a little distressed and tense and you have to excuse us,” she said.

Manning and Rowley have had their differences in the past, with Manning’s supporters accusing Rowley of being responsible for the downfall of the PNM administration.

During his period as a backbencher, after he was removed from his Cabinet post as Minister of Planning and Development, Rowley continued to criticise Manning’s administration in the Parliament and was a thorn in his side, prior to the lead-up and during the prematurely called may 2010 general elections.

Contacted for comment on the issues surrounding his aborted visit to Manning, Rowley would only say, “I have no comment to make on that matter.”