Sometime in 2009, as his presidential term came to an end, I was grappling with making a proposal to ghostwrite Eddie Fenech Adami’s autobiography, but knew I faced three potentially fatal hurdles:
The first was time. I was editor of this newspaper, and not sure I would find enough of it to produce a book. Intermittent persistence thankfully prevailed.
The second challenge was a little trickier: Eddie had gone on record several times saying he would never produce an autobiography. Which meant that somehow, somewhere along the line, I was going to have to talk him round. But that could wait. So, one fine winter’s day in the blossoming gardens of San Anton Palace, I asked him if he’d do a few interviews to coincide with the end of his public life… and he said ‘yes’.
When I did eventually get around to broaching the unmentionable subject, the time had come to own up to a deficiency of my own: “I wasn’t born in Malta,” I blabbered to a man who already knew, and spent practically all my formative years – crucially from the ’70s through the late ’90s – abroad. So, even though the book would be in the words he recounted to me, I doubted whether I was the most suitable person to extract from him a past I had not lived.
As I placed all my cards on the table, Eddie produced an Ace: “That’s the only reason I’m agreeing to do this with you,” he said. “You’ll deal with me more objectively than a party diehard.” It was a juxtaposed moment, whereby he trumped my doubts by singlehandedly slaying his, but it was one which, for me, will forever mark him out as more equal than most others.
I was not the only one who considered Eddie a special breed. On the cusp of his landslide electoral victory in 2013, Joseph Muscat acknowledged it too. Malta needed Fenech Adami in 1987, the then Opposition leader had said in an effort to reach out to disgruntled Nationalist Party supporters, as he talked of a ‘movement’ rather than a political party that would be based on a culture of meritocracy rather than political favouritism; good governance rather than corruption; openness rather than secrecy.
Not only did Muscat torch every utterance that got him elected; he gleefully gutted the foundations underpinning them
Picking up that gauntlet during a journalist-politician meeting – to those on social media who know nothing about journalism, these are encounters that should happen and, irrespective of political creed, do happen except when personal relations have been severed beyond repair – I warned him that the hunger within a party starved of power for many years threatened to undo his fine rhetoric. “It won’t happen,” he retorted, in a reassuringly dismissive tone.
Muscat certainly had a gilt-edged opportunity to live up to his promise given his unprecedented majority; which endowed him with the power to build on the positive achievements of previous administrations, take advantage of an economy that had just turned the corner after a global crash and convert his words into long-lasting action.
Some will no doubt argue the electorate should have seen through him, but they tend to belong to a camp who continue to believe that a politician acts in bad faith because he comes from a particular political party rather than because of his or her individual make-up. Malta will never mature while this blind prejudice persists, and even less so if ‘blame’ for his rise continues to be attributed to voters and the media.
“That’s democracy,” Eddie had exclaimed after suffering a humbling electoral defeat in 1996, and it would be more helpful to acknowledge that, in truth, Muscat deserved his chance, especially since his emergence came at a time when the Nationalist Party’s long tenure in government was rapidly being suicide bombed by its own MPs.
Yet with the guile of a serial arsonist, not only did Muscat torch every utterance that got him elected; he gleefully gutted the foundations underpinning them. He achieved this great feat by using soldiers of steel with loyalty to him rather than their country to seize key institutions like the police, army and regulatory authorities and bludgeoning the financially-stricken independent media with his 40,000-vote truncheon. This pitiful situation reached its shameful nadir, and marked the beginning of his end, when Daphne Caruana Galizia was brutally assassinated in a public show of unabashed impunity.
Yes, his government can cite a list of material achievements. But no amount of perfume will sweeten the Bvlgari-wearing hand that has a penchant for making quick visits to the Arabian desert, which, he reminded us with an unwitting sense of Shakespearean irony, is purely his business – not ours.
Quite the contrary, any legacy he may have hoped for – irrespective of how many glorification videos have appeared in recent weeks – has been burnt to a cinder in an inferno of Australian bushfire proportions… Eddie’s, meanwhile, lives on and will continue to prosper.