A memorandum went out, promptly on the morning of May 25, after the night of People's Partnership victory. The memo admonished, urged, advised, even ordered that, with the People's National Movement (PNM) rule over, and righteousness finally prevailing, murders should at once stop.

Such is the stuff of a Kamla Persad-Bissessar heromyth, burnished to a high sheen on PNM-propaganda radio, unreconstructed and unapologetic, and actually spread by other media. On Thursday evening, a giant figure "80" on TV6 represented the count of murders committed since May 24.

The ceasefire memo had been unavailing, and the mythmaking proceeds about a failed injunction which had ordained an instant cessation of killings.

No guns fell silent; no scores have been left unsettled. For purposes and by hands still unknown, blood continues to be shed. It is to the People's Partnership that ownership of the last six weeks of murders must be ascribed.

As in other post-PNM periods since 1986, the shape is emerging of a familiar orthodoxy, marked in equal measure by nostalgia and fear of the unknown. Encore sentiment for the "PNM country" trope builds to bursting point inside the hearts and minds of people programmed to trust no other defining circumstances for Trinidad and Tobago.

Patrick Manning had pushed to breaking point the elastic tolerance for the PNM way, set deep in the T&T electoral mentality. Arima and Arouca voted for the Congress of the People; Diego Martin and Point Fortin came nail-bitingly close to doing so.

Still, that has not dispelled the yearning for the PNM comfort zone T&T has inhabited for long, and unquestioning, decades. Under the opinion leadership of Keith Rowley, people persuaded themselves that Patrick Manning had become a toxic aberration crying out to be rectified if only by electoral defeat.

In an even more durable myth, then, what happened on May 24 amounted to the rebuke and the repudiation of "one man," as Conrad Enill called it, not of a way of life, not a debunking of the idea of "PNM country." In an early campaign speech, Hazel Manning decried the atmosphere of "hate" in which, she said, the then government operated.

She was right. People love to "hate" the PNM. But her husband recognised that since both love and hate occurred in sometimes equal proportions, the actual outcome was worth the gamble.

What suffered heavy defeat on May 24 wasn't a PNM way of seeing the world. It turns out, then, that the People's Partnership administration, and its leading people, are liable to be measured against a familiar PNM way of looking and of doing things.

Indeed, before ministers could have done anything, it's how they look and how they sound, so discordant against a PNM background, so dissonant against a PNM soundtrack, that shape attitudes. Days in office, Attorney General Anand Ramlogan swung right out, targeting the point of the chin, each of Keith Rowley, of the Integrity Commission, and of acting Police Commissioner James Philbert.

First, for the length of her skirts, Health Minister Therese Baptiste-Cornelis called attention to herself as a "character". Then, for speaking out, as it were, without the leader's permission, telling some rowdies "Shut up!", she described a jarring mode. As yet, neither policy nor action in health can be attributed to her, but attitudes are being predisposed.

The attitudes imply knowing suggestions that the new ministers are unused to the ways to power, that their behaviour disavows adherence to a style recognisable as that of (PNM) people to whom the ways of government come naturally.

Under Persad-Bissessar, herself a six-year veteran in the Basdeo Panday cabinet, government is due to be reinvented for the political marketplace of 2010 and later. The ministers, the ministries, the portfolio content, represent her own, deliberate, choices.

Comfortable himself with calling shots in multiple capacities, Jack Warner, in this administration, has been identified as the second in command. He may yet be the closest in the Government to a polarising figure, with sentiments strongly for and against him. Undeniably, however, it is he whom Mrs Persad-Bissessar has cast in the roles scripted both by historical chance and by present necessity.

Like terrorists, the killers keep on killing, scoring hits as yet unreduced by political and administrative change. So far it's Mr Warner and Mr Ramlogan, but not the prime minister, who are invoking the distant relevance of the death penalty.

Unaffected, the body count remains stable at just under two murders a day. Nearly six years ago, PNM attorney general John Jeremie had vowed to hang the convicted killers.

To apply hanging as the ultimate deterrent of the hanged is to recognise the death penalty as a challenge for legal professional technology. Likely still available to the administration for this purpose are the services of a senior counsel with the redoubtable record for hanging murderers—ten in five weeks in mid-1999. Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj.

Impressed with such proficiency and the implied potential, Patrick Manning had in 2002 offered to hire Mr Maharaj as a "special prosecutor". That the deal was never closed eight years ago need not discourage the talent-scouting Kamla Persad-Bissessar today.