Bird family of pollies nested happily in their Caribbean home
Flags are at half-mast following the death of former Antigua Prime Minister Sir Lester Bird, but not everyone will miss him.
OBITUARY
Sir Lester Bryant Bird
Politician. Born New York City, February 21, 1938; died Antigua, August 9, aged 83.
The nation of Antigua and Barbuda is much like Papua New Guinea: beautiful, reliably warm, hopelessly corrupt and festooned with men bearing knighthoods.
The country was led to independence by the towering (213cm), long-serving prime minister Sir Vere Cornwall Bird. He effectively ran Antigua from 1960 to 1994, when he handed the reins over to his son Sir Lester Bryant Bird.
Another son, the elder Vere Jr, had been favoured to inherit the prime ministership – it was a democracy of sorts – but was edged out in a decades-long brotherly arm wrestle.
Under their father’s leadership Antigua was described as a “music hall version of a Caribbean island”. Arms – including 155mm howitzers – were shipped illegally through it to South Africa when that country was the subject of a UN arms embargo.
In April 1990 a shipment of Israeli arms was discovered at the farm headquarters of the Colombian Medellin Cartel drug gang. It had arrived there via Antigua.
About that time a company operated by the dynasty controversially began exporting Barbuda’s rare pink sand.
Vere Jr made few friends when, as minister of aviation, public information and public utilities, he awarded a contract to repave the then humble VC Bird International Airport to a company in which he held shares, a deal valued at about $4m but the cost of which came in at three times that.
Not long before, notorious international criminal financier and drug runner Robert Vesco began negotiating with the Birds with a plan to buy most of Barbuda, the nation’s second biggest island, to create a sovereign state that would have been named Sovereign Order of New Aragon.
The New York Times reported in 1990 that “Antigua (is) a standout even in a region increasingly known for drug smuggling and money laundering”.
While many thought the Birds should have been caged, they did develop Antigua as a relatively sophisticated tourist stop.
And many of those moneyed visitors became noted residents, including former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Eric Clapton, Richard Branson, James Bond actor Timothy Dalton and Oprah Winfrey.
Sir Lester’s life could have gone in such a different direction. He was a sporty teenager and played cricket for the national team under the banner of the Leeward Islands. He took long-jumping more seriously and won bronze at the 1959 Pan American Games held at Chicago’s legendary Soldier Field, an event so poorly organised that, without practice facilities, the Mexican shooting team trained by shooting squirrels in local parks.
Sir Vere was an uneducated man and wanted better for his sons. He had five. Both Sir Lester and Vere Jr studied law, Sir Lester in the US and England, where he was admitted to the Bar at London’s Gray’s Inn.
Back home he practised in Antigua, as did his brother. Sir Lester won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1976 when his father returned to power after five years in the wilderness – helped, perhaps, by a pledge to end income tax. Sir Lester became deputy prime minister and was given a series of ministries – foreign affairs, trade, tourism, energy and economic development. It was reported that he benefited from the construction of the Royal Antiguan Hotel. He later entered negotiations with New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump to sell it when the nation’s foreign debt position became acute.
Sir Vere won the next three elections (in five-year cycles) and retired before the 1994 poll, making way, reluctantly, for his second eldest son. Sir Lester won in elections described by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies as “neither fair nor completely free. The (Antigua Labour Party’s) domination of the broadcast media, its inordinate use of public resources to influence the vote, and its vast, unaccountable spending made for a highly uneven playing field and confirmed that rule in Antigua and Barbuda is still based more on power and the abuse of authority than on law”.
Nonetheless, at the next poll, Sir Lester increased his majority. He took the opportunity to reinstate his disgraced brother to cabinet. But at the 2004 poll the Bird dynasty was up-ended and the prime minister lost his seat. He stayed on as ALP leader and won the seat back at the 2009 poll. Having been replaced as ALP leader he contested, and won, the seat again in 2014.
And that year he was made a Knight of the Order of the National Hero. At that time his nation’s annual per capita income was just $US12,730. Before the pandemic stopped international tourism that had quickly risen to $US17,113 in just five years. But the Birds had long been wealthy indeed.
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