PM’s dad: I’ve never voted JLP, but now…

BY GARFIELD MYERS Editor-at-Large South/Central Bureau

Morris Holness says Michael Manley was ‘a great guy’

SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — He is the prime minister’s father, but Morris Holness has no difficulties whatsoever discussing his own political leanings or the fact that he has never ever voted for his son’s party, the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

In fact, Michael Manley, the now late iconic leader of the People’s National Party (PNP) in the 1970s, was greatly admired by the elder Holness, which is how his son Andrew Michael Holness — born in 1972 the year Manley came to political power with the message ‘Better must come’ — got his middle name.

The elder Holness says that on every occasion in the past when he has voted he has put his X beside the PNP’s Head, apart from those occasions including 2007 “when I don’t vote because I don’t like how PNP getting on…”

But with parliamentary elections now in the air with his son as prime minister and at the helm of JLP, Morris Holness says he is getting ready to support his boy “100 per cent”, though he insists that he is “not a Labourite, not a PNP either…”