His end came quickly, when it finally did. Last Tuesday, Labour MPs decided that their past votes of confidence had been an extended prank, and voted all but unanimously to expel Konrad Mizzi from the parliamentary group.
One swallow does not make a spring, certainly not in a place where bird migration tends to be whimsical.
Still, I would like to believe that what happened on Tuesday was momentous, and does in fact hold seasonal promise. To understand why, we have to go back to Joseph Muscat.
Muscat – and therefore the various votes of confidence that mechanistically follow the leader – was consistent in one thing. He always held that allegations could never be grounds for ending, or at least suspending, political careers. By ‘allegation’ he meant any claim, no matter how grave, that was not, or had not yet been, upheld in court.
Which is why his standard response to calls for action was always that he would wait for the outcome of inquiries or court proceedings. In the case of Mizzi and Keith Schembri, that was a byword for never. No matter, the point is that Muscat apparently believed that political and legal accountability were one and the same.
Exactly why he did not in the end apply that maxim to himself is a moot point. Muscat was nowhere near a court when he resigned ‘for the good of the country’, so I suppose he could have dismissed Mizzi and Schembri equally for the good of the country, had he wanted to. But he didn’t.
Mizzi’s post on Facebook on Tuesday was vintage Muscat. The prime minister had asked him to leave the Labour parliamentary group, he wrote. The reason he was going nowhere was that ‘allegations and speculation by the enemies of the Labour Party’ were just that. What Mizzi didn’t realise was that Muscat was vintage.
By the end of the day, Mizzi’s head and body had left the tower separately. Robert Abela was not about to pan away this nugget of a chance to make it clear that he was his own man and not Muscat’s or anyone else’s. Leader’s privilege meant that the vote was clear and unanimous. No surprises there.
Except Abela’s does in fact mark a departure of some sort. For the first time in years, here’s a prime minister who acts on the grounds of an allegation (or 10).
After all, Mizzi hasn’t so far been convicted of graft. He may well be lily white, in fact, just as there may well turn out to be red unicorns on Mars. You never know.
Which brings me to the slope. Muscat’s reasoning, implied or otherwise, was that to act on allegations would be a slippery slope. Anyone with a keyboard and some fingers could allege anything, and we’d be in for an endless round of resignations and dismissals – and mounting political instability.
Problem is, any philosophy undergraduate will tell you that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy. It is not necessarily the case that one thing will lead to a madder other.
For the first time in years, here’s a prime minister who acts on the grounds of an allegation (or 10)- Mark Anthony Falzon
The notion that a nobody could bring down, say, the prime minister, simply by accusing him of bootlegging in his spare time, is a caricature.
In between that caricature and Muscat’s Church of the Proven Proof is not a slippery slope, but rather something called the middle ground. And, because Tuesday’s vote suggests that politics in Malta may be about to shift to that middle ground, it’s probably worth a ramble.
Certainly the protagonist of that middle ground would be the press. Without wishing to sound like a bishop, the middle ground places great responsibility on journalists.
Let’s put it this way: a journalist who knows that their allegations will be taken seriously had better take their allegations seriously.
Individual and house reputations, and checking and rechecking sources, are key to a functional middle ground.
The reason our hypothetical bootlegging allegation deserves to be dismissed is that it comes from a nobody who represents nothing, and who has no history of investigating a story responsibly.
And no, ‘responsibly’ doesn’t necessarily involve coming up with proof – certainly not the kind of proof dealt with in court. In Mizzi’s case, and lack of proof notwithstanding, Daphne Caruana Galizia and the Times of Malta and the many others who wrote about it were not being irresponsible.
They had among their arsenal a million non-proofs, as well as reams of circumstantial evidence. That should suffice for the middle ground.
I’m aware, and I’m sure the prime minister is aware, that there will be risks. The reputable and the diligent can and sometimes do make mistakes. There will be casualties, too. But they will not die in exploding cars, nor will they lead to the biggest and most shameful political episode in recent history.