The Emperor's Clothes - updated version

It does seem that the famous fable of the Emperor's Clothes has now been updated. In the latest version, when the wise guy starts shouting that the emperor had no clothes, three absurd men suddenly appear from nowhere and inanely order him to shut up, or else... The wise guy quits and the emperor's loyal supporters keep on praising their emperor and admiring his clothes. And so they lived happily ever after!

All last Sunday's papers reported the short statement made by the MLP Vigilance Board to the effect that the board had written to Alfred Mifsud warning him that action will be taken against him unless he stops 'harming' the party through his writings.

Writing in the GWU daily, l-Orizzont, last Wednesday, Mr Mifsud's niece, lawyer Anna Mallia, cast serious doubts on whether actions of the MLP Vigilance Board were in line with the MLP statute. Dr Mallia did not mention the warning given to Mr Mifsud but there is no doubt that she considers the methods adopted by the Vigilance Board in that instance to be abusive and illegal. That could be a moot academic point, but the rules of the politics game are quite different from those followed by lawyers playing games in the courts of law - even though many lawyers do not seem to comprehend this!

At the time of writing, the news is that Alfred Mifsud has decided to bow out from the MLP, although whether this means he has decided to quit politics altogether remains to be seen. Obviously, Mr Mifsud realises that legal niceties do not figure in this game. It is the content of the message he received that counts, and not whether the messenger was flouting the party statute.

What was Alfred Mifsud saying that enticed the wrath of the MLP Vigilance Board? In what way was he 'harming' the MLP? Basically Mr Mifsud insisted that the recent MLP leadership contest should not have been held before the party concluded its analysis on why it lost the April election. As a corollary of this argument, he had later pointed out that when the MLP executive had decided to hold the contest without waiting for any developments on the much awaited analysis, it was labouring under the impression that Alfred Sant would not be a candidate for the leadership contest. Then, suddenly, the scene was changed while the script remained the same!

Mr Mifsud was also asking why the party had to lose an election before it changed its policy on EU membership. This was the fault of whoever (for this read Alfred Sant) devised the strategy that led to the MLP's debacle at the polls, and this, he probably hoped, would be clear from the said much awaited analysis.

Finally Mr Mifsud was questioning whether the MLP can win the credibility stakes when the change in its EU policy was made without a change of the party leader, a man who had clearly been the heart and soul of the old - now discarded - policy that he had, in fact, conceived.

In all his various writings in various newspapers, Mr Mifsud kept on repeating the same arguments, or rather the same aspects of the same argument. In truth, it must be said, that his argument led nowhere except to the replacement of Dr Sant as MLP leader. The writings that the MLP Vigilance Board described as 'harming' the party were, in fact, 'harming' the leader's image, and not the party as such. Indeed, although Mr Mifsud never spelled it out, what he was saying was tantamount to insisting that Dr Sant should quit for the sake of the party.

At the end of the day, the much awaited report on the Labour Party's election fiasco did refer to the wrong strategies adopted by the MLP as well as to the party's unorthodox decision-making process. However, it did not point any fingers at anyone in particular. As one reporter put it, it did not "bell the cat".

This seems to indicate that the report did not vindicate Mr Mifsud's stance in a clear and unambiguous way. The fact that the MLP Vigilance Board took action against him at the same time - by and large - when the report was concluded and presented to the MLP administration is not, in my opinion, just a coincidence.

Whither Alfred Mifsud now? Last week, The Sunday Times reported that he had wryly told journalist Herman Grech: "Time will tell whether I was right or not." Ominously, these words echo those uttered by former MLP deputy leader, George Abela (iz-zmien jaghtina parir), as he left the MLP General Conference that approved the calling of an early election in 1998 when the 1996 Labour administration had only been 22 months in office.

Meanwhile, the party faithful will obviously keep on admiring the emperor and his clothes.