In time, Jack Warner might come to appreciate that the single biggest mistake of his career was accepting a Cabinet position and assuming high public office in Trinidad and Tobago.

With a better understanding of himself and a deeper grasp of the nature of the political culture, he might still be lording it at FIFA headquarters in Zurich while more effectively ramping up the UNC campaign in his role as chairman of the party.

Instead, like so many self-made czars who walk with the confidence of having conquered the world, he under-estimated the challenges of public office and took one step too far, confident that straightening out T&T was sure to be suck-eye for one with the smarts to run with the lions of FIFA.

He couldn't have been more mistaken.

For a man who had risen to giddying heights in the jungle of international football, there couldn't have been a more wrong fit than as a minister in the Government in T&T.

The very skills and personality traits that carried him to the top of FIFA's global football empire and out into a business empire of his own, have been the very elements that have served to trip him up in public office.

The signs of the misfit were there from early.

Within months, the indefatigable Jack Warner was confessing to exhaustion. Soon, signs of weight gain were becoming evident. Then the fatal lapse in judgment that led him, a sitting minister of Government and FIFA vice-president, to present himself in person at the cash distribution session with Bin Hamman at the Hyatt.

And of course, last week, the escalation of frustration which had him so beside himself that he lost control of himself and tried to take control of the Police Service.

For his own good, and ours, Warner should not be in public office.

Indeed, his appointment was a massive miscalculation by both the Prime Minister and himself which, from the outset, held the potential for their undoing.

It would be easy to denounce Warner in the same terms of those who call for his dismissal. His critics may even be correct in their reasons for declaring him unfit for public office.

But Jack Warner is not some individual aberration of our politics that can be resolved by prime ministerial decree.

He has been here before, and he will come again for, as a type, Jack Warner is a product of the culture, although as an individual, he may even be a victim of the culture that has created him.

As an aside, let us recall the memory of another titan, Lawrence Duprey who, during the first Panday administration, mounted a platform and, with complete confidence, addressed the issue of crime as though it were the easiest problem in the world to solve. Fortunately for him, he wasn't, like Warner, put to the test as Minister of National Security, although he, too, would eventually overstep his bounds in politics and trigger the forces that would lead to his undoing.

Jack Warner's rise to prominence as an uncut and unplugged force represents the extreme possibilities of a culture without the capacity to answer the complex moral questions posed by financial success in a society where morality and blood money have co-existed happily from its very origins as a economy built on the backs of the brutally enslaved.

That original sin on which Caribbean society has been founded continues to complicate our lives to this day by robbing such fundamental concepts as truth and justice of their uncompromising clarity. The result is a widespread amorality which releases us from the responsibility of judging the colour of money so that we might forgive and forget that, however much it has been laundered since, it had begun as blood-red.

In the fluidity of the amoral environment, Jack Warner, energetic, ambitious, smart and ever-resourceful, carved his unique pathway to success, only to lose this footing by over-reaching himself into public office.

We can easily understand that Warner's modus operandi in his private life would run afoul of the requirements of public office. So, the surprise is not that it has happened, but that Warner and the Prime Minister had not taken the necessary precautions for protecting themselves and their government. Had they, he would not have been brought into the Cabinet.

And yet, their decision to take the risk is perfectly understandable.

How could they imagine that an electorate that had been so willing to ask no questions, seek no guarantees and demand no standards of them in the naked pursuit of electoral victory, would suddenly turn around and demand standards in governance and public life?

Indeed, for a while, standards hadn't mattered at all as the UNC took control of the Government and annihilated the partnership with the full complicity of its partners and their supporters.

Imagine their mystification, therefore, at the burgeoning public criticism when neither Warner nor the Prime Minister is doing anything different from what they have always done. No wonder they are inclined to believe that the public outrage and protests reflected in the media are conspiracies perpetrated by journalists and the parliamentary opposition.

The truth is that what has changed is not the politicians in government but our judgment of their capacity to do the job.

We knew that Patrick Manning had to be stopped; we used the People's Partnership to do the job and asked no questions because we needed the illusion of a viable alternative. That illusion was definitively blown apart by the Reshmi Ramnarine affair. Since then, all that we have been doing is trying to figure out our next move.

For now, the environment is completely fluid and all options are in play.

As for Warner, he is now boxed in. The smart move will be to step away from the Cabinet now. But personality compulsions will not permit this, neither will the Prime Minister desire it.

For now, she needs Jack Warner in the role of lightning rod, attracting and focusing public outrage away from her. At the right moment, but not before, she will attempt to dispense with him and rescue herself and her administration. In preparation for that moment, she needs him for helping to secure the two critical seats in Tobago.

Timing, as always, will be everything. But, as Jack Warner's career has taught us, the future is in nobody's control.