Background
Lewis, Vaughan Allen was born on May 17, 1940 in St. Lucia.
Saint Lucian government official
Lewis, Vaughan Allen was born on May 17, 1940 in St. Lucia.
Bachelor in Economics, University Manchester, 1962. Master of Arts in Economics, University Manchester, 1963. Doctor of Philosophy, University Manchester, 1970.
He served for a brief period as the fourth Prime Ministers of Saint Lucia following the resignation of John Compton. Lewis, a former director of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, assumed the office of Prime Minister on April 2, 1996. He also served as Minister of Finance, Planning and Development, and Minister of External Affairs.
In elections that followed on May 23, 1997, Lewis and the UWP suffered a huge setback, losing all but one of their seats in Parliament, forcing him to resign in favor of the leader of the Saint Lucia Labour Party, Doctor Kenny Anthony.
Compton defeated Lewis for the UWP leadership in a party conference in Soufrière on March 13, 2005. Compton received 260 votes against 135 for Lewis.
Following this defeat, Lewis resigned from the United Workers Party and joined the Saint Lucia Labour Party. On 7 September 2006, the executive of the Saint Lucia Labour Party endorsed Doctor Vaughan Lewis as its candidate for the Castries Central constituency in the December 2006 general election.
Lewis" defection to Labour was controversial.
He then told UWP supporters first that he was the endorsed candidate. He then told them that he was taking time to make up his mind. There were two other candidates, one of whom, then Senator Petra Nelson, subsequently left the Saint Lucia Labour Party to campaign for the United Workers Party in the 2006 General Elections.
On the face of it, Labour put up a good front, hailing Lewis, the same man they had previously ridiculed as an uncontrollable drunk in 1997, as a great Caribbean citizen and intellectual who was betrayed by Sir John Compton.
Lewis returned to academia and was a Professor at the University of the West Indies, Street Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago. He has returned to Saint Lucia occasionally to appear on the platform of the Street Lucia Labour Party.
He was chosen as part of a task force to explore the possibility of a union between Trinidad and Tobago and The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. After the Street Lucia Labour Party government returned to office in 2011, Lewis became a special advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Finally, he quit the UWP all together and said that he was no longer interested in electoral politics. More troubling for Labour"s top strategists was the fact that Lewis had brought Desmond Brathwaite into the party with him.
However, Lewis had been in talks with high-ranking members of the Saint Lucia Labour Party about his defection since he was defeated by Compton in the leadership contest.