Dennis Reyes

 
As a trusted civil servant and signatory to the Official Secrets Act, Dennis Reyes has been party to some of the most memorable moments in the past three decades of Gibraltar’s history – but has not been free to discuss them. While personal secretary to two successive Deputy Governors – Foreign Office appointees Dick Neilson and John Broadley – Reyes was party to many of the triangular discussions leading to the opening of the frontier…

“But, as on other occasions, I was a little pawn…very much in the know, but I couldn’t talk about what I knew,” he says of this period in a Civil Service career that has spanned more than three decades working for the Gibraltar Government.

And though Reyes has a reputation for outspokenness that has not always endeared him to colleagues in the Rock’s bureaucracy or to some of our politicians whom he has helped over procedural hurdles in the House of Assembly, where he has served as Clerk for the past ten years, some of that ingrained reserve was still apparent when he met VOX over a coffee this week. For, above all Reyes – who retired earlier this month – is the epitome of tact. Indeed, if Gibraltar had its own diplomatic service Reyes would undoubtedly have been ambassadorial material.

Greying-haired and soft-spoken, he was an unlikely candidate for the wrath of any Chief Minister so his widely publicised contretemps with Peter Caruana in the House of Assembly last year surprised everyone – including Reyes.

HASSAN ADMIRER

“It was a moment of stupidity on my part…and a moment I would prefer to forget,” he admits. “But it had been a bad day in the House…the Speaker had had a bad day…in fact it was a bad day for everyone.” Tactfully we turn back to the opening of the frontier and Sir Joshua Hassan – for whom Reyes confesses affection and considerable respect.

“I’m a great admirer,” he says. “Sir Joshua was not only a very astute politician, he was also very much a man of the people, in the best possible sense. He had a marvellous capacity of remembering people’s personal details – the sort of man who would walk down Main Street and stop to talk to a street cleaner, asking him how his wife was. ‘I’ve heard she wasn’t too well recently,’ he would say. Or he would stop and chat to a grandmother and congratulate her on the birth of her latest grandchild.”

Sir Joshua, as the then Chief Minister, played a significant part in the discussion surrounding the opening of the frontier and Reyes reckons that throughout the highly secret negotiations both Sir Joshua and the Spanish brought with them a sense of urgency.

“After 18 years that the border had been closed Gibraltar seemed to be stagnant and Sir Joshua was determined to bring about a revival – for one must remember that opening the frontier benefited Gibraltar as much as it helped Spain. Franco’s era was on its way out – though not yet completely eclipsed – and at local government level, in the Campo, there was a similar sense of urgency,” he recalls. “The eagerness of all three parties was almost tangible.”

NO DRAWBACK

Though Reyes did not regard it as a drawback, or go so far as to describe his approach as ‘autocratic’ – a view that not all observers will share – he stresses Sir Joshua’s reputation as “the Octopus”.

“He enjoyed having a finger in every pie,” Reyes recalls. But then the same can be said of Sir Joshua’s successors – Sir Robert (Bob) Peliza, Opposition leader Joe Bossano and Peter Caruana.

“They all come in proclaiming their policy of giving free rein to their ministers to take decision…but it doesn’t last for long,” he chuckles and the laughter is reflected in sparkling hazel eyes. “Pretty soon everything comes back to decisions at, and by, No 6.”

Reyes cut his Civil Service teeth in the Tax Office, where he started his career in May 1965, and later moved from there to become Civil Service Training Officer – a p0ost he filled with distinction for five years. In this role he was not only responsible for all the induction courses for newcomers to the Civil Service, but held and organized training sessions across the board within the service to mid-management level. He mourns the disappearance of this post – which he views as important to inculcating the sort of dedication we expect, but don’t always get, from Government employees. The post “disappeared” during the Bossano regime for the former trade unionist was “no lover of the Civil Service”, Reyes admits wryly.

ELECTORAL ROLE

As well as his spell in the Deputy Governor’s office and a return to the Tax Office, Reyes finally moved to the Financial & Development Secretary’s staff “where I thought I would probably end my career.”

Instead, when a vacancy as Clerk of the House occurred ten years ago, Reyes applied for the job. It also cast him in the role of returning officer for several elections – the first in the by-election of 1999 – and he was also referendum Administrator in the watershed referendum of 2002 as well as handling the European Parliamentary elections – again a first for the Rock.

These “firsts” for a Gibraltarian give Reyes a particular sense of pride, he admits. For he sees them as among the highlights of his career.

“In the 1967 referendum Britain clearly regarded us as incapable of running something like that ourselves and sent someone out from the UK to administer it,” he says. And again he chuckles as he recalls, with justifiable pride, the fact that in all the elections which he has supervised only one ballot paper has ever been lost.

“That was in the 2002 referendum and when I found out, I immediately reported it to Gerald Kauffman the senior British Labour MP who had been sent out as a senior observer of the process. He was astonished that I mentioned it at all, and told me that in British elections literally hundreds of ballot papers went missing each time. “don’t bother to report it,’ Kauffman advised me…but I did.” And those who recognize Reyes’ deep integrity will not be surprised that he did so.

HISTORIC MEMENTO?

“I can’t say for sure what happened to that missing ballot, though probably someone decided to keep it as a souvenir of what, after all, was to be a historic occasion - or it might have just been thoughtlessness on the part of an elderly voter who forgot to put it in the ballot box, crumpled it up and put it in his or her pocket instead. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.”

And his skills as a returning officer and Referendum Administrator are such that although he has officially retired, Reyes has been asked to take on the cloak of authority for a final time to administer the referendum on the new constitution when it is held later this year.

As Clerk of the House Reyes has seen “major transformations’ during his decade in office. As well as the “much needed” major refurbishment of the Assembly premises – “It must be the only parliamentary building in the world that has two commercial cafes or restaurants on its ground floor,” he points out - there have been major changes in the production of Hansard (the parliamentary record) and of various booklets which the House staff produce in situ.

“Things have moved quickly in a very short time,” he says, and though the House of Assembly is “not unique in this respect”, the changes have been significant. Computerisation has both eased and speeded up the work of the House’s small staff, and during Reyes’ term has made it possible to provide a full index of all questions – making these and the ministerial answers swiftly accessible for the first time.

“Before we produced the index one could spend hours or even days trying to track down a question and the answers to it,” he adds. And, as well as the technical changes, he also believes that the standard of debate and the level of speeches has improved. He is too tactful, though, to say whom the better speakers are or have been.

“What will I do in retirement? I don’t really know.” A smile lights up his face. “All my life I’ve been too busy to develop any hobbies or outside interests…and I shall certainly spend time on all the books that I have bought but haven’t managed to read. But I don’t intend to be a couch potato – I’m sure that I will find something interesting to do.”

Travel? VOX suggests. “I might travel to somewhere like Canada. I have been there, and to Bangladesh and Singapore with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association…But I found the level of poverty in Bangladesh alarming and depressing – though it did show me how lucky we are in Gibraltar. Canada, on the other hand, showed just how much further we still have to go. But I’m not really a very adventurous person…”