Like Ringo Starr, the majority of Labour MPs seem to prefer the shade of the octopus’s garden, ‘warm beneath the storm’. But the more of them that speak up in favour of their disgraced leader remaining prime minister till January, and the more of them that lash out against the protests, the more reason there is to insist that Joseph Muscat must go now.
At this point, it shouldn’t need saying that Muscat is thrice disgraced. His slumber (on the most benevolent interpretation) over the past three years ensured that dangerous people continued to operate under his nose. He snoozed on his watch.
Next, his public behaviour over the past few weeks has been scandalous – as pointed out by a retired senior police officer speaking to this newspaper, by the former Chief Justice, Vincent De Gaetano, and by various European authorities, politicians and media houses.
Finally, there is his refusal to leave immediately, despite the representatives of virtually every economic sector saying that it is essential. He has decided he is the key to stability, despite having plunged us deeper into instability. He insists he is an exemplar of strong leadership that the country needs, despite having been, at best, perversely weak where it really mattered.
Now, to top it all, he is giving a farewell tour around Malta portraying himself as a martyr, if not a scapegoat. He says he is carrying his political responsibility, while actually refusing to carry it. He even has the nerve to say he is carrying responsibility he need not carry. He is carrying, he says, the cross of others.
That is a perverse spin on events. The man ultimately responsible politically for this crisis – he who said that Keith Schembri is accountable to him alone and that he trusted him – is now effectively denying responsibility. He pretends to accept it but he doesn’t really: for he says he accepts it in the spirit of noble obligation. He does not accept his disgrace.
That’s why anyone – of whatever partisan persuasion or none – who wants to minimise the chance ofa crisis like this ever repeating itself, should insist that Muscat goes now.
Yes, there is the fact that he should not remain in Castille when his own secretariat is under investigation. Given his own claim that it’s only his approval that secured the police the necessary resources, the new police motto risks appearing to be: Iosephe, Dirige Nos.
Beyond that, however, is another reason, one for posterity. We cannot address this crisis properly if we do not recognise that there were a number of signs, early on, that were simply ignored.
[Joseph Muscat] has decided he is the key to stability, despite having plunged us deeper into instability
It’s not hindsight that leads us to say action needs to have been taken in 2016 against Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. People said so at the time. It was so obvious that people around the world were astonished that none was taken. It required considerable effort and obduracy not to take action. It required, at a minimum, political complicity (as distinct from criminal conspiracy).
That amounts – on the kindest reading – to a comprehensive failure of leadership. You have to be out of your depth not to see something seriously awry with Panamagate, with the Electrogas arrangements, and indeed with every report featuring Schembri. It was disastrous incompetence.
Healthy democracies make their leaders pay a price for disastrous incompetence. Such leaders go on the spot. They do so to save the country further embarrassment – their final act of loyalty to the country’s institutions.
But leaders also go to make the penalty for gross misjudgement so steep that all future leaders will be mindful not to repeat it.
By making his departure seem to be his gracious favour to us all, a sign of his political goodness, Muscat is covering up the lessons we should all be drawing from this mess.
And the Labour politicians colluding in his pretence are also participating in the political cover-up. They may think they are doing the Labour Party a favour by circling the wagons and not ceding an inch of argument. But they’re not.
In the short term, they are of course right. From that myopic perspective, hats off to Silvio Schembri for his performance on last Friday’s Xarabank on TVM. It was a bravura performance. He took everything that the public is feeling about Muscat’s Labour – arrogance, instability, hypocrisy, violence, greed – and laid it at the Nationalist Party’s door.
But rhetoric alone won’t outlive the short term. Realistically speaking, the immediate crisis happened because the guardrails of good governance were removed – possibly only for clientalistic reasons. But, in so doing, the Labour government opened itself up to a covert takeover by truly bad actors.
So, even by Labour’s own narrative – we’re a basically sound political party that has been victimised by a few bad apples – the government it leads participated unwittingly in its own shaming.
For Labour to recover fully, it must recognise the serious faults of its leadership. Muscat is not someone who loved, like Othello, not wisely but too much. He mismanaged badly and grossly misjudged. He encouraged arrogance and worse against those who protested.
So far, we don’t have any such recognition from within Labour. On the contrary, we’re told that what’s needed is a return to the jewel that Malta was a few weeks ago. Seriously? Surely we should be talking about a political cancer that had long been spreading, and which requires extensive chemo treatment.
Without such treatment, the crisis will return in some other form.
A country cannot live dangerously, without proper legal and conventional frameworks that separate powers. Court danger and danger will engulf you.
That’s why the protests should go on. The anger isn’t there simply because of the crimes committed. It’s also there because the environment hospitable to crime had long been spotted; yet it was denied where it mattered.
And we find ourselves now, even after the eruption of the mess, seeing protestors blamed and menacingly warned. Even as we’re being assured that the crisis is being addressed properly, the path for the next crisis is being paved. That’s a good reason to protest.