The anointed one

This article was first published in The Malta Independent last Thursday.

Dom Mintoff anointed Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici as his successor, and now here we are, left in no doubt at all that Alfred Sant has anointed the man I dubbed Sant’s poodle way back in 1997. The name stuck, and now everyone uses it. Why? Because it’s so appropriate. It wouldn’t have dogged him (oops, sorry) for all these years if it wasn’t such a good fit.

Joseph Muscat has launched a pre-emptive strike that is designed to put off all competition. His massive, all-over-the-media campaign, at a time when absolutely no one else is figuring in the show, is his and Sant’s way of telling everyone: this is the Chosen One. All others keep out.

Muscat is speaking not as a contender for the leadership, but as the leader. He is not telling us what he wishes to do, but how he plans to do it. You have to hand it to the kid: he’s got it all sewn up. Six years ago, he gave an interview in which he said that he finds electoral politics distasteful, and that to his mind you have to be a robber or a missionary or just plain crazy to enter the game. Here it is, in his words, taken from Malta Today (6 January, 2002):

“Would I consider going out for general elections? Definitely not. You see, I have another theory that to stand for the general elections you must be either a robber, a missionary or just plain crazy. I don’t think I’m any of these. And I don’t really like the local system where you find yourself standing against candidates who have the same ideology as you do.”

It’s a good thing he’s going to be co-opted into parliament, given that he thinks you have to be a robber (I suppose this is a literal translation of trid tkun halliel), a missionary or a candidate for the nuthouse to get your seat by working for it in a general election. Yes, he certainly has it all worked out. Then like others before him Who Shall Not Be Mentioned, he can contest the 2013 general election as party leader, and get 14,000 personal votes without competing for them – unlike all those other robbers, missionaries and madmen.

Incidentally, I wonder into which category he slots his mentor Alfred Sant? Missionary, no doubt. I won’t be too specific about my own view.

God bless the Internet and on-line access to newspaper archives. Just Google Joseph Muscat and all kinds of riches pop up, like the reams he wrote during the EU referendum campaign, when he told us in great and painful detail of all the torture we would endure if Malta joined the union. He described in even greater detail the sort of paradise that Malta would be if we adopted the Great Leader’s Vizjoni ta’ Partnerxipp. This is the very man who has since spun round like a weathervane in a Force 9 gale, and who is trying so hard to convince us that he is the new European Wonderboy. What a shame that all of his articles are going to come back to haunt him. And haunt him. And haunt him some more.

Joseph Muscat is backed right up against that wall. If he continues to spout the nonsense that he did before the 2003 general election, we won’t trust his “European credentials”. If he does a little U-turn in the middle of this rather busy highway, he’s going to get mown down. And you know what happens to politicians who sit on the fence: they get spiked in a very inconvenient place.

When Sant said he was resigning irrevocably, there were people who read into his words the wider meaning that he would be heading off home to spend the rest of his days talking about turgid literature with Frans Sammut. Oh, how wrong they were. Before the election, I thought that if Labour lost again, the party would shake off Sant for good and go through much-needed reform. I thought that the Young Turks would force out the man and all those associated with him. I didn’t realise that the party’s Stalinist control methods have eradicated all Young Turks (of whatever ages) and strengthened the internal totalitarianism.

After the election, when I was luxuriating in the knowledge (I imagined) of not having to see Sant’s face on television again or hear that refrigerator-voice, something happened to shock me out of my reverie. It was the press conference Sant gave to announce his “irrevocable resignation”. “Oh my god,” I thought. “The man is staying on in the shadows. He’s going to anoint somebody and be a kingmaker.”

The first person who sprang to mind as I sat horrified in front of the television, wondering why all the reporters were taking him at his word, was the little fluffy one. But I thought that they couldn’t hope to pull it off: foisting a 34-year-old who models himself on David Beckham, and with all the depth of a puddle in my backyard, on the Labour Party as the New Great White Hope was going to be an impossible feat. I reckoned without the gullibility and impressionability of the delegates – bad mistake, given that they had elected Sant on the strength of his Harvard certificate.

So I thought The Chosen One would be Evarist Bartolo, with Joseph Muscat in the role of bridesmaid. As for the other bridesmaid, I worked out that Jason Micallef would make a perfect match for the other JM. Evarist could put one on either side and get them to smile for the cameras – in which case, the photographers would have to bring out their light meters.

Oh, but I was wrong. They are going to pull it off. Joseph Muscat is going to steamroll, or be steamrolled, over everyone else to become the new Labour leader. The alternative to Lawrence Gonzi is going to be a 34-year-old know-it-all with the demeanour of an irritating twerp and an arani ma, kemm jien bravu’ attitude.

The thing about Joseph Muscat is that he is a natural follower, not a natural leader. Children fall into one category or the other, and that is how we stay until we die. There is a third category, that of the loner. It is a small one, but strangely, it has provided us with the two most recent Labour leaders.

I’m not going to discuss all the respective characteristics of leaders and followers here. It’s not the place, and with the internet you can easily get all the information you want. There is one important characteristic, though, that I must point out. People who are natural leaders form independent opinions and hold those opinions irrespective of the dominant current. Rather than being swayed by the opinions of others, they sway others towards their opinion. Joseph Muscat, on the other hand, has spent his adult life being swayed by the opinion of whosoever happens to be his mentor at the time.

Forever needing a mentor of one kind or another is another sign of a follower, too, and these are just some of the mentors that Joseph Muscat has listed in his many silly articles: Alfred Sant (the number one), George Vella, and Joe Debono Grech. Yes, he does know how to choose them. For a time, when he worked at Super One while Alfred Mifsud was in charge, and later when he went to work for Alfred Mifsud at Crystal Finance (as an investment advisor, if you please), Mifsud was a mentor too. But when Sant and Mifsud fell out, and Mifsud received a stern letter from the Labour Party’s Vigilance and Discipline Board, Muscat found it opportune to distance himself somewhat. Fortunately, he was elected MEP soon after, and so he didn’t have to set about looking for another job with another investment advisory company.

Meanwhile, Muscat is modelling his campaign on similar campaigns that we remember well – those of one A. Sant. His website is littered with his academic achievements and his dikris. While the undue obsession with letters after one’s name is a peculiarly Maltese (and Indian, I’m told) disease, in the Labour Party it appears to be particularly acute. If you were to try applying for a post with a corporation at the age of 34 or 60, by focussing only on your academic achievements and enclosing copies of your certificates, you would be crossed off the applicant list immediately. You wouldn’t even reach the interview stage. At that sort of age, what employers want to see is proof of activity and achievement in the real world.

Yet Muscat and Sant insist on waving their dikris in the electorate’s face as a reason why they should be given the job of prime minister. Sant published his Harvard certificate in the book that his friend Frans Sammut wrote about him a couple of months ago. Can you imagine – a man of 60 waving his 1970s university certificate about to prove that he is the right man for the job?

And now here is his anointed one doing the same with his PhD. What is even more interesting is that Muscat, like Sant, is shoving in our faces his dikris in economics and management as evidence that he is fit to run the country. It’s the same sort of attitude you get in a third world state where 90 per cent of the population is illiterate and the man who went to university rules the roost. You know what they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Ah, but that doesn’t apply to Malta in general. That applies to the Labour Party. Maybe this is the time to remind both Muscat and his mentor Sant that the prime minister who got Malta into the Eurozone, slashed the deficit and practically eliminated unemployment has exactly the same university degree as Anglu Farrugia, whose website seems to have been written using translation software. Go to www.anglufarrugia.com if you don’t believe me. Meanwhile, the man with the Harvard training in management did…well, I needn’t go on.

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The biggest mistake that Muscat is making, one that only serves to emphasise how callow he is, is in talking as though he is already the party leader. He knows that his election is inevitable, but he should at least have the decency (and the brains) to pretend that it isn’t. Unfortunately, he has a lot in common with Jason Micallef – rather too much, I would say. They’re very similar.

Here’s Joseph Muscat, talking like it-tifel bravu tal-mama in his interview with The Sunday Times, last Sunday. If he is really going to be Malta’s next prime minister, he had better grow up fast or Malta is in big trouble. Here are some choice excerpts.

“I have a 15-year project for the party and the country. During a maximum five years in opposition, we will spend the first two years transforming the party…In the third and fourth years, we will tell people what we want to do. Experience has shown us that telling the electorate that the Nationalists have lied and are not delivering is not enough. People want to know what we are doing.”

Ding-dong! Muscat has realised that the best way to win an election is to tell people what you are going to do, and not what the government is failing to do, because unless they are mentally incapacitated, they can see that for themselves. As for that 15-year plan, I suppose Muscat wrote it in the 10 days between Sant’s irrevocable resignation and last Sunday’s interview? Come on, who are we trying to kid here? The plan, if there is one and it is not just a figment of his imagination, must have long since been written.

Here the new Labour leader again: “The Labour Party has to map out a clear manifesto by the next election, so that the electorate knows where it stands on all issues.” Ding-dong again! Kemm hu bravu l-boy. Skopra l-Amerka. Yes, Joseph – and this time, make sure that it has no misprints, no computer malfunctions, and no items that have already been finalised by the government. You’ve got five years for writing and proof-reading. Start now.

Like his erstwhile namesake at Azzjoni Nazzjonali, Joseph Muscat speaks of himself in the third person, which is inevitably a warning sign. Look at this, for instance: “I will say it loud and clear – Joseph Muscat as leader of the Labour Party is an invitation for everybody to work together. Choosing Joseph does not mean excluding Michael or George.” Yes, I’m sure George Abela is going to trip over his own feet in his haste to be led by a boy scout with pretensions.

Somewhere, probably on my blog, and before he announced his candidature, I wrote that Joseph Muscat will only take on the party leadership if he is 100 per cent certain that he will be prime minister in five years’ time. He does not want to be Labour leader as such. He wants to be prime minister, and he is not going to give up his nice MEP life for anything less than that. I should have been a psychologist, because here’s what he told The Sunday Times: “It will be a pyrrhic victory just to win for the sake of leading the Labour Party.” Somebody explain to this chap what a pyrrhic victory is, because they clearly didn’t teach it in Economics and Business Administration. “I’m interested in leading the Labour Party for its last term in opposition, and to then govern with a project. I look forward to being a Labour prime minister at 39.”

His grasp on history is so weak that he imagines he will be the youngest Maltese prime minister ever in the history of the world. It might come as a shock to him to learn that others got there first, including Mintoff and Borg Olivier – though it is heresy to compare I-want-to-be-Beckham to either of them (for different reasons).

The self-aggrandising Muscat went on to dig himself deeper by describing himself as charismatic, apparently unaware that those who do so are by definition not so. He compares himself to Tony Blair and David Cameron, seeing himself as both rolled into one. He appears to be unaware that their self-assurance is not rooted in academic qualifications and certificates, but in an extremely privileged family background, schooling and upbringing. Maybe he actually thinks that the British Labour leader is a working-class kid made good, who went to elocution lessons and took training in table manners, rather than the son of considerable privilege. That will be the day – when Labour elects a tal-pepe person as leader. Not even the Nationalist Party has dared do that since Borg Olivier and the glamorous Swinging Sixties.

Ah, here’s more presumption from the man who talks as though he is already elected: “I am not willing to waste time. We have to hit the ground running. I will change things drastically. Some things might not be liked. Others will.”

Then the interviewer asks him whether he sees himself in the mould of Lawrence Gonzi, “whose charm and charisma have managed to appeal even to some Socialists.” And Muscat replies: “Well, as David Cameron once said, I think it won’t hurt anybody to have a young and charismatic leader.” If your only selling-points are your age (it can work against you) and the fact that you think you’re charismatic when you are not, you’re a dead duck, mate. And charisma alone is worth nothing. Charles Manson had charisma, for heaven’s sake.

The interviewer asked him whether he has any regrets, and Muscat’s reply was even worse than his Number One mentor’s. He actually quoted a couple of lines from My Way: “Regrets, I have a few. But then again, too few to mention.” Really, this is the stuff of which prime ministers are made. The next five years should be fun.