Durrant Pate/Contributor

Jamaica’s longest serving President of the Senate, Oswald Gaskell Harding, King’s Council, has died at 90-years of age.

The elder statesman, born November 3, 1935, died yesterday. No details of his passing have been disclosed, but Harding has been ailing for some time. Harding was the first person to serve as President of the Senate of Jamaica for two non-consecutive tenures, serving from 1980 to 1984 and from 2007 to 2011. 

First appointed to the Senate in 1977, he served in the body continuously until 2002, and rejoined the Senate from 2007 until he retired from politics in 2011. Harding’s first period as a senator was the longest continuous tenure in the Upper House of Jamaica’s parliament. 

Early political beginnings 

In the 1976 general election, Harding ran as the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) candidate for the Saint Andrew East Rural seat but lost to the late Roy McGann of the People’s National Party (PNP).  In 1977, he was appointed to the Senate, and after the JLP won the 1980 general election, he became President of the Senate. 

He held the post until 1984, when he became Leader of Government Business in the Senate, and was made a Minister without portfolio in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. In 1986, he was made Minister of Justice and became the Attorney General of Jamaica. 

After the PNP recaptured control of the government in the 1989 general election, Harding became the Leader of Opposition Business and served in the senate continuously from 1977 until 2002, when he asked not to be re-appointed after the 2002 general election. His time in the Senate was the longest continuous tenure in the body’s history. Harding attempted to win a seat in the House of Representatives twice during his tenure as a senator. 

In the 1993 general election, he attempted to unseat incumbent representative John Junor in Manchester Central. In the 1997 election, Harding attempted to unseat another sitting PNP representative, Horace Clue, as part of a three-way race for the Saint Andrew East Rural seat that Harding contested twenty years prior. 

Securing 4,819 votes, Harding came second in the voting, behind Horace Clue’s 6,769 votes, but well ahead of the 1,026 votes secured by National Democratic Movement candidate Andre Foote.