There’s one thing about this story of Joseph Muscat’s close encounter with the Rheingold I can’t quite get my head around: it was largely mongered by One News and TVM.
It was, of course, an open secret that his aspirations were made in Brussels. Still, it wasn’t as if we expected him to take candy from a baby. A week or so ago, word was that he was not remotely among the favourites.
Not that we thought he ought to have been. Every four years, and in spite of the historical record, English football fans are both amazed and disappointed at the Cup’s refusal to come home to beer-swilling merriment. Maltese people are made of more sober stuff. We expect, by default, to be sidelined and sent back home empty handed.
Which means it would have been easy for the Muscat camp to play down events as yet another example of the bearable lightness of being small. Muscat is neither French nor German, and we wouldn’t have thought his missed appointment with bigness particularly unusual or tragic.
Except the Muscat spin clinic had other things in mind. Within minutes of the result, Castille’s Head of Communications Kurt Farrugia posted an atmospheric monochrome photo of a backlit group of men, stoic in adversity. TVM’s ‘sources’ (ahem) broke the news that Muscat had come within a whisker of the Presidency of the Council. Narrow and all that, but a story of defeat nonetheless.
You could cut the schadenfreude with a rusty knife. The ‘almost’ and ‘on the verge but not quite in’ jokes were so predictable they were unfunny. And yet we laughed and laughed, and then some more. The point is that I can’t be the only one asking how they could have got it so wrong. There are two possible answers.
The first is that they did because they did. The problem with people as successful as MuscatPL is that you lapse into believing they can’t make mistakes, at least not so far as PR is concerned. In this case, there’s always a chance that Farrugia and his satellites replaced a vowel with a consonant as they cooked it up.
What next for Muscat, then? I’d say more of the more-than-agreeable same
Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe MuscatPL’s PR is invincible after all, and the whole thing was a masterclass of clever design. Question is, what sort of design?
One of the curious things about the story is that it invites us to ask what’s next for Muscat. In other words, that it suggests that he’s in a bit of a fix, when in fact he’s anything but.
Let’s be nice to the man. If going back to being a prime minister is his definition of failure, we may be on to something really great here. Bit of a Cassius perhaps, but still. That of Prime Minister is widely considered the top job, and I don’t see why it should bring so much shame and disappointment. Not many of us can treat a bunch of top brass to pastizzi u te in Rabat, or share the frisson of a plush red carpet with Macron, or look Melania Trump in the eye (almost).
Nor did Muscat get to partake in all these pleasures by a whisker. The manner of his being the Prime Minister is quite extraordinary. Not a month ago we were talking about the greatest historical tkaxkira storika in Maltese history. There was the tkaxkira of 2017, and that of 2013, and so on.
Muscat, in other words, holds the biggest prize a politician can get in a democracy. He has the democratic vote, in sustained and high doses. He also has it against two opponents – the Opposition, and the opposition of the Opposition.
At which point the gilt of the Presidency of the Council begins to rather wear off. Through no fault of his – French and German passports are too expensive and complicated to get – he was always going to be the compromise candidate anyway. He would have got the job, not on his merits but because of a lack of agreement about other people’s. Who needs any of that, when you can win an election (or seven) fair and square?
What next for Muscat, then? I’d say more of the more-than-agreeable same. I don’t for a second suppose that he will nominate himself as European Commissioner. That would be infra dig for a prime minister, especially since he would first have to face the Inquisitors (or was it quaestors?). In the event, Panama and Made in Brussels would be what a broken toe is to a marathon runner.
Besides, who would want to have to spend time away from Malta in l-aqwa żmien? The whole point of a Golden Age, it seems to me, is to be able to live in it.
I’ve a feeling that this whole ‘almost there’ business was a mise en scène. The clue is in the last sentence of the TVM coverage: “Il-Prim Ministru issa ma huwa marbut mal-ebda data u jista’ jibqa’ fil-kariga sal-elezzjoni li ġejja” (“The Prime Minister is now free to stay on until the next election”). Add to that the spin about a tidal wave of popular support begging him to stay on.
The plain truth is that the Prime Minister at some point decided not to fulfil his own prophecy of premature exit, and that he and his PR team fancied that what was needed was the condiment of a good story.
The trouble with theatre and stories is, they don’t always go down well with everyone. Backlighting or no monochrome.