One of my favourite movies stars Matt Damon plays the role of David Webb, a.k.a. Jason Bourne, a young man turned into a human killing machine for the C.I.A., who spends the whole of The Bourne Identity (and its two blockbuster sequels, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum), gradually regaining his memory of the past and the deeds he surely did commit.

Today in Barbados we have a political scientist denying he ever did what another arm of the U.S. government says he did, although those actions were merely the exercising of vocal chords.

My friend and colleague Peter Wickham recently issued a denial after the dumping of a quarter of a million emails by accident by the idiots who run Wikileaks led to the discovery that a person, identified by the local U.S. Embassy as one Peter Wickham, had been fairly chatty with the ‘emboffs’ (embassy officials?) over many years.

Yet the information attributed to Peter was nothing more than we have all heard and maybe helped spread at cocktail parties and other events, and even if accurate, does not rise beyond what is commonly believed or expected of the region’s politicians.

Flying people home to vote? Par for the course. Paying people’s utility bills or handing out groceries? So what else is new? Fraternising with society’s not-so-great-or-good? Which politician doesn’t?

Was this the reason why Peter was fired from his moderator’s job at CBC? Really? Is this DLP government so afraid of its own shadow? Sorry for the rhetorical question.

After bringing to the House one of the least imaginative and most dead-in-the-water Budgets ever to be presented to Barbados, perhaps the government is looking for someone to take down. Well, congrats: You have taken down Peter Wickham. But only from a radio show.

There may come some good from all this. Journalists and people who deal in sensitive political information should never talk to representatives of foreign governments unless it is in a public forum where everybody else who wants to can hear.

I am not for a minute saying that Peter Wickham did otherwise. This is just a thought being offered to my colleagues in the wake of the leaked embassy communications and my own experience.

Back in the 1990s. I used to get invited to lunch by U.S. Embassy political operatives, and after trying to help the person understand our country a bit better by talking about the economy and the political situation, I found the questions starting to get a bit too subjective, as in “And what do you think of so-and-so as a leader?” plus requests for comments on some politician’s perceived lifestyle or personal traits.

Before that decade was over I told them I regretted being unable to lunch with them - ever again.

So, while I do not place too much weight on the importance of the info put into the cables released by Wikileaks, I realise there could be some fallout on the business side for Peter, if the political parties which have employed him in the past decided to punish him, should they be convinced that his identity is the same as the source of the leaks. 

But, sadly for them, should they do that, they would lose the services of the man whose methods have proven to be perhaps the most accurate in depicting voter opinion and voting trends over the past decade or more.

In regional polling, there is just no organisation that can match Peter Wickham’s CADRES. I mean that sincerely, and I am sure his professional services will remain in high demand on the basis of their quality, despite the leaking of those embassy communications. At most, they air only mildly dirty laundry, and if we had the kind of free press we sorely need in this region, that information would already have been way out there in the public domain.