The fix is in for King
Old ABC minister finds new flag of convenience
It’s a common-enough sight.
The executive director of a local trades organization handing a cheque to a community group.
Darin King has handed out tons of cheques since he quit politics in 2015 as a provincial Pea Sea and started running Trades NL. Plenty of pictures online, too.
The one that appeared on Facebook a couple of Fridays ago was different.
King wants the nomination as a federal Conservative candidate and the Monday after that picture appeared, King met with the guy who posted the picture and a few other of his old friends, all of whom are on the committee that will greenlight King as a the federal Conservative candidate in Bonavista-Burin-Trinity.
In the picture, that’s King on the left in the blue jacket and in the centre is Steve Bonnell, the guy who posted the picture on behalf of the CHS. He’s also on the local Conservative riding association. You might recognize some of the other names involved in approving King as candidate. There was Sandy Collins, a former Pea Sea cabinet minister, f’rinstance and Steve Kent, the original man with a coat of any colour hanging in his closet. Used to be a Big Danny Boy ready to do the slimiest of slimy things to push Muskrat Falls through. Now’s he an organizer for the federal Conservatives.
In his political career, Steve’s tried all the political colours in Canada except maybe NDP and the Bloc Quebecois. In 2006, he went off to a Liberal convention and was so tight with local Liberals, they did not believe it when SRBP wrote not long afterward that Kent was lined up to run for Danny Williams in the fall 2007 election once then-incumbent Harvey Hodder packed it in. The guy Brian Tobin once tried to lure into provincial politics as a Liberal was going to run for Danny Williams.
VOCM ran a story based on that post in 2006 2006 and had to walk it back when an embarrassed Kent found out he’d been found out and called the newsroom. Not true, he claimed. Haven’t ruled it out or in. And then six months later - poof! - he was out of the closet with his Danny colours flying proudly. Just like King who has been shopping for a nomination for years, all the while handing out cheques for Trades NL.
Now Kent is the regional guru for the federal Conservatives and many of the old Anything but Conservative crowd are also filling in slots for Team Pierre. King, Kent, Collins. Terry French is flirting with a run again as is Keith Hutchings and none of them are distancing themselves from their past. On the contrary. King was making phone calls to potential Conservative voters in BBT long before he went public with his plan to run for Pierre Poilievre. He’d play up how close he was to Danny and da b’ys on da Hill like Tony and Barry.
Couldn’t mention any actual Conservatives, of course. King isn’t really one of them, which is not surprising since Liberals will tell you that before the polls shifted against Justin, Darin was feeling them out on maybe running in Churence Rodgers’ place when he packs it in. The polls turned and Darin swapped out his red briefs for a set of Con Blue boxers. Not surprising either then, that Elections Canada records three donations by Darin King to a federal political party since 2015. All to the Liberals. Not even a caribou quarter for the Conservatives. Nor is it surprising that former member of Parliament Roger Simmons will tell you that young Darin used to volunteer on *his* campaigns back in the 1980s.
Darin might get elected as a Conservative if the polls keep on the way they are but if they switch, expect Darin to pull a Bill Matthews and hoist the Red flag of convenience to rack up pensionable time. Bill, you may recall was the Pea Sea who jumped from provincial to federal politics in the late ‘90s and won a safe Liberal seat by a fluke during an intense provincial crisis in health care. Three Pea Seas got elected that time and as the polls turned, so too did Bill turn his coat to the Liberals to save his second pension. Bill stayed with the Liberals, retired in 2007, and in his last open political gig was one of the key players in Danny Williams’ failed bid to make Frank “Spuds” Coleman the Premier.
Darin also doesn’t have much of a record to run on. The Anything but Conservative foolishness wrecked the Pea Sea party for a decade so even if the Cons can forgive *that*, they might consider what that says about Darin’s judgment. Then there’s his performance as a cabinet minister. Nothing to write home about even in a cabinet famous for people long on inflated self-image and short on the gravitas to back it up. As SRBP put it in 2015:
Consider King's performance in the House this past year. In April, justice minister Darin King clearly had no idea what was going on in his own department with the Dunphy shooting. Opposition justice critic Andrew Parsons exposed King as an incompetent and King seemed eager to confirm his incompetence day after day.
In 2010, King misled the House of Assembly and the people of the province about a serious contract problem at the College of the North Atlantic in Qatar. In 2012, King's inept management of the House exacerbated the government's problems with the Term 29 debate in the spring sitting and the debate on Muskrat Falls in December. As trade minister, King played a central role in the government's stupid effort to blackmail the federal government over the European trade deal. And in his first stint as justice minister, King frigged up budget cuts in his department by ignoring the advice of his officials. Cabinet had to reverse cuts King made on his own.
Perhaps the defining moment of King's political career was his role in the political lynching of Gerry Rogers. As Government House Leader, King led the attack on Rogers despite the fact that Rogers had - quite obviously - done nothing wrong. King never apologised to Rogers, let alone to the people of the province, for his behaviour.
The episode combined King's first characteristic - ineptness - with his second defining characteristic: being an officious prick. Throughout his political career, King never failed to came across as a miserable little bastard about anything he was involved with, even when such a demeanour wasn't necessary.
There was even his reputed tendency to insist people call him Doctor King since he’d taken a degree from some now-defunct college in the United States. Never seemed right to call him Dr. King because of the other Dr. King of the American civil rights movement, which is why around SRBP he came to be known as Darin Luther King. Kinda suited Darin the same way his cabinet colleague Kevin became Fairity O’Brien.
In other words, King drags a lot of baggage behind him and there’s not much in his back of political tools to counterbalance it. Doesn;t matter. His friends on the selection committee will green light him. The fix is in. They might even frig over his one competitor in their overzealousness to make sure their friend gets free flights to Ottawa. Even if they greenlight the competitor, too, there’s always other ways to put their thumb on the scale in the time-honoured way of crooked Newfoundland and Labrador politics so there’s no cha ced Darin will lose. They could - for example - put only one ballot box out in the enormous district and then put it on the Burin peninsula where King’s base is even though most people in the riding live a long way from King’s old provincial seat.
Even if the riding association greenlights him, King would still need to get past the crowd in Ottawa. And if they can manage to hold their noses and accept King, voters would have to forget the mess King enthusiastically left the province in, Muskrat Falls, massive debt, and all in order to vote him in. If the Liberals found a decent alternative, they might have a shot at hanging onto the seat.
In 2015, it looked like people might not forgive and forget so quickly but it’s amazing what time and a few big cheques can do to erase people’s memories.
Let’s see what happens to Darin Luther King this time around.
Darin Luther King is set to be a Conservative member of Parliament but he’s got a lot of very heavy political baggage from his days as a charter member of the Danny Williams Fan Klub. Stay on top of the latest scuttlebutt. Become a Bond Papers subscriber.
Isnt Darrin King the fellow who started his working career as a Board Director for the Avalon Education Dept. His training is in education if I’m not mistaken, another teacher to our political rescue.