"This conference will not be used as a campaign," Mr Samuda told The Sunday Gleaner. "We are not in any election mood."

We do not know why Mr Samuda would assume that anybody thought the JLP would be about the launch of an election campaign at this time. The window of opportunity for a snap poll, in which the JLP would seize the advantage against an organisationally shambolic and intellectually flaccid Opposition, has passed. And not because Mrs Portia Simpson Miller's People's National Party is in any, or much better, shape than several months ago.

Slow and unimaginative

Rather, the Golding government has been slow and unimaginative in responding to Jamaica's home-grown economic problems when it came to office in September 2007, and behaved like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights when, soon after, it was confronted with the global credit crisis and recession. At first, it was stunned into paralysis and when it recovered, it was with a less-than-thoughtful flurry of incredible assurances that Jamaica would not be materially affected by the crisis.

Time has revealed the magnitude of that miscalculation. So, an election now would, in some respects, be a referendum on people's expectations against the Government's delivery. Although, to be fair to the administration, it has more recently begun to articulate the breadth of the problems and the tough decisions to pull Jamaica through the crisis.

In that regard, political advantage or not, Prime Minister Golding and his advisers might determine that the economic reforms to be undertaken are so sweeping and the conditionalities for a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund so potentially demanding that an election is required for a government to be assured of a mandate to push them through. That would be similar to Michael Manley's approach in 1980.

We do not sense, at this time, any serious questioning of the legitimacy of the Government, despite its thin parliamentary majority, to do what is necessary. Nor do we discern within the Opposition either the stomach to undertake the job, or the policy preparedness to do it successfully.

On all fronts, there are ample reasons for soberness at the JLP's conference as the party takes its stride into the third year in office. The JLP, a product of history and structure, does not have a tradition of its organs and delegates generating policies which might work their way up to the leadership and the Government. As a senior party official recently pointed out, policy formulation is primarily the function of the leader.

In that regard, the tone of this weekend's conference will, by and large, be the mood adopted by Mr Golding and his ministers. Our suggestion to the prime minister is that he treat this party conference and any address he makes to delegates as though it were the beginning of his term in government and that he has three years to get the job done - and that is all the time he will ever have in office.

He should, therefore, tell his delegates all the tough truths and then begin to implement the hard, but necessary transformational decisions.