Malta may or may not be full up. What’s less debatable is that the prime minister and his predecessor are full of it.
Take the latter, who, within a week, managed two long television interviews and one short adieu to parliament.
The idea was the making of private citizen and all-round sage, Joseph Muscat, who did a world of good for the country but who was also not absolutely perfect because nobody with a belly button is.
This improbable alchemy was facilitated by the docility of his interviewers. The first was Karl Stagno Navarra, who appears to have a boundless talent for speaking convenient untruths to power.
The second was Peppi Azzopardi’s former sidekick on Xarabank and one not exactly known for his surgical scrutiny of public life. Suffice it to say his preamble was his ‘great admiration for Muscat’s vision’. Fool.
The drift throughout was that it was Muscat’s lot in politics to carry the stamp of other people’s defects.
The man was trusting to a fault and that was that. Problem is, even Stagno Navarra’s brown nose was not enough to save him from looking clumsy, charitably put.
Take Muscat’s remarks on the Central Link road. It takes a consummate statesman to suggest that people are somehow free to boycott state infrastructure. By his reasoning, those of us who are unhappy about Electrogas should buy a wood stove and some candles.
He also said that women should have full control over their bodies. A few minutes later he added that a hypothetical unwanted pregnancy would put him, not his daughter, in a tricky position. Go figure.
However, that’s by the by because the point is that Muscat’s showboating of sorts is part of a broader political strategy.
Muscat serves Labour well because the Labour Party’s election campaign will be based on the storyline of economic boom and he happens to be the very image of the years of plenty.
Never mind that his time gave us other plenties aplenty. Muscat was not perfect because no human has been in the whole of history. In any case, he paid the ultimate price: he is now a private citizen, champagne flute in hand at all times.
The second part of the strategy is about the prime minister – more precisely about the prime minister and his new opponent. What happened at that first meeting on Tuesday was shameful, to say the least.
Some have said that it was proper that the meeting was not cordial, simply because there is nothing particularly cordial about the government’s recent doings. I disagree.
Joseph Muscat serves Labour well because Labour’s election campaign will be based on the storyline of economic boom- Mark Anthony Falzon
I think it’s called a sense of occasion. A first meeting is there to establish goodwill and a productive working relationship. There will be time for Abela and Bernard Grech to propose and oppose, as long as the rules are in place.
Except Abela chose not to touch gloves. Instead, he behaved like a schoolyard bully. Grech was out of his depth and that’s a compliment.
I was in school with Grech. We were friends and partners in mischief – and in detention – on many an occasion. And, yet, not once was he booked for being a bully: it just wasn’t in his nature then and I’m sure it isn’t now. Some things never change because they are all about character.
When I saw Grech sitting tongue-tied and visibly discomforted opposite Abela last Tuesday, I knew exactly what was going on. He had been set up to be the thing he wasn’t.
I mean a bully, not a politician. Tuesday’s meeting was a staged event. It was designed to put Grech in his place and make him look weak and incompetent.
An unscheduled game of conkers, in which the prime minister pulled out the oldest chestnut of all.
Just at the right moment, Abela raised his voice and went on a base and populist rant about how Grech – one day after his election, if you please – had undermined (‘fixkiltni’) his tough stance on migration. Besides, the people of Marsa and Ħamrun now had Grech to thank for their misery.
That moment was broadcast all over the press, obligingly. It was exactly as Abela had planned: the newly-elected leader of the opposition made to look clueless on his very first public appearance.
Except it’s not that simple. Speaking for myself, my reaction was not how great Abela was but, rather, what a nasty piece of work he was turning out to be. The schoolyard bully may well manage to make his victims look weak, for a moment. After a while, he just makes them look decent and certainly compared to him.
This, then, is Labour’s gloves-off strategy for the next election: to let Muscat whistle the economic-miracle tune at a safe distance as a private citizen and to bully Grech into the trap of populist sparring. Problem is, the proverb about love and war says nothing about politics.