"Jack Warner for Prime Minister," the man said with a broad grin on his face, leading me to wonder what effect Trinidad and Tobago's World Cup qualification will have on the UNC's internal politics?
I doubt that Mr Warner wants to be prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago not that he is not a man, like so many self-made men, of vaulting ambition but his gaze, I sense, is fixed more on the FIFA presidency and if that strikes you as being more than a tad preposterous then you don't know Jack Warner and his ilk.
After all who, except his close cronies, would have predicted his meteoric rise to the FIFA vice-presidency and, closer to the home front, who would have predicted his seizure of the UNC 's deputy political leadership.
Listen, the day after the first Bahrain bash (the 31-year-old Dennis Lawrence having butted that country's football pretensions into the desert dust) I travelled through most of the marginals on the Laventille Rhythm Section truck and, I tell you, had Jack Warner been on that truck we would not have made it home that night, so many people willing to line up to wine him with grog and garland.
As it was at more than one junction our approach was hailed with the Rudder line "Laventy here we come", thousands of Trinidadians in their full ethnic mix hailing the returning "rhythmers" as heroes which fellow journalist turned entrepreneur Louis Lee Sing, who was there, swears they were:
"Keith, when Yorke lined up to take the corner, those men dropped a mind-blowing rhythm drama ("they had been practising it whole week under the direction of Roy Cape's drummer, Don Craigwell", I told him) and the thing sounded like you know when a Roman army marching and all of us got goose-pimples and became charged up and the next thing you know Lawrence had the ball in the back of the net!"
Well, the tens of thousands who lined the road from Port of Spain to town weren't on spot like Louis to make that inspirational connection but they knew that the sons of Success Village had had their own struggle before Jack's aggressive diplomatic intervention got them to play literally at the last hour, making it not necessary for them, as one Earnest Edwards insisted would have been the case, "to make the most noise in the stadium even without our instruments".
So, as I said, at almost every corner they were hailed as heroes. Imagine, then, what would have happened had Jack, theirs and the team's champion, been on spot, all those Indos and Afros and Trini-mixes eager to give them the keys to their hearts if not their homes.
Well, the one thing you can't say about Mr Panday is that he chupid and the next thing you can't say about him is that he doesn't know, more than many, where the political wind is blowing so I, for one, won't be surprised if, even as we speak, he is plotting how to make his peace with Mr Warner which is to say with Mr Dookeran not even a political innocent like the latter likely to pass up the UNC chance to use this, well, Warner win to their short-term political if not long term electoral advantage.
To my mind these are early days yet with the overall situation fluid enough to leave me ambivalent about whether the World Cup, well, win will turn out to be one of those decisive "accidents" that Best keeps talking about, Jack Warner now emerging as a can-do black man inside the UNC, that bridge, perhaps, across the ethnic divide that Mr Panday has had in his mind's eye all these years long.
Look, don't think that I am thinking that Jack Warner's World Cup victory (as it has been identified in so many words by the formidable Lawrence Duprey) will send PNMites rushing into the UNC camp. Only-who knows what will move the two or three or four hundred in the marginals who stand to make the difference between the heights of government and the "wilderness" (Mr Dookeran's word) of opposition, a born-again UNC at least possible given Jack's present popularity.
The challenge is--how to play this particular game given the last thing the UNC would want to do is to make the World Cup qualification an instrument of division, their own supporters sure to turn on them if they set out to upset the national feel-good, but if there is one politician in town who understands the political rewards of being on the side of winners or, perhaps more beneficially, of winners being on your side-Jack Warner who, politically, made the ethnic crossing now in pole position to cross right back over again.