Horses for courses

The newspaper Malta Today, which has no discernible source of revenue apart from the very few advertisements on which it is impossible to run an office and newsroom, seems unable to gauge when a campaign should be brought to a halt.

It continues to fight a battle that was won five years ago, when Lawrence Gonzi became leader of the Nationalist Party and John Dalli, the ‘horse’ backed by Malta Today, did not. The battle is over, and continuing it is entirely pointless. Even if the Nationalist Party finds itself looking for a new leader in a few years’ time, Dalli will not be a contender, to use the word in the context made famous by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.

Ever since the party leadership election back then, Malta Today has waged a war on the man who ran off with the prize – which right now seems more like a poisoned chalice – and has gone out of its way to run him down. This went on even right up to the eve of the general election last year, when I found myself wondering whether the people who run that newspaper are really so keen to cut off their noses to spite their faces that they were prepared to help Alfred Sant to victory and live under him for five years just for the perverse satisfaction of sticking the ultimate dagger into Gonzi.

The newspaper has now reached the point where it has undermined its own credibility because its motives are increasingly transparent and its gloating over bad news is a tad too unpleasant, reeking of personal animosity and Schadenfreude rather than concern for the country and its citizens.

You would think, reading Malta Today, that it has a rabidly anti-government, anti-Nationalist Party editorial policy. You would never imagine that it rooted for, and still does, a key politician in that party who is also a cabinet minister in that government. You would imagine that the ‘horse’ Malta Today backed, and still does, belongs to another party altogether, the one that sits in Opposition.

I cannot understand Malta Today’s tunnel-vision strategy in rooting for one cabinet minister while doing its best to undermine the government of which he forms part. If the government falls, it falls as a whole, and Malta Today’s horse falls with it.

In its enthusiasm for causing maximum damage to the man who became party leader when, as Malta Today sees it, the party leader should have been somebody else, the newspaper is doing John Dalli no good at all. This is not just because the attacks are now widely perceived to be taking place with his blessing if not his direction – something that is just too incredible for me to believe because I know him to be far too sharp to become embroiled in anything that will bring him up hard against a brick wall – but also for the far more obvious reason that if the government is weakened, Dalli is weakened with it.

If and when the Nationalist Party is voted out at the next general election, Dalli’s political career, because of his age and for no other reason, will be over. In your mid-60s, you can’t sit around in opposition for five or 10 years waiting for your party to be returned to government and hoping for a cabinet post in your 70s. But if the Nationalist Party scrapes through in 2013 – so many ifs – then Dalli will just carry on.

So Malta Today’s strategy is one which is geared, wholly unintentionally but with the entirely predictable blindness that is the inevitable fruit of bitterness, to hastening the end of John Dalli’s political career.

Perhaps it is not erroneous strategy which forces the newspaper in that direction, but deliberate manoeuvre. If Dalli has decided to take up the position of EU Commissioner when, as it now seems increasingly likely, it is offered to him, then Malta Today may have concluded that it can spend the next three or four years raining heavily on Lawrence Gonzi’s parade, as it has done for the last five years or more, without its man suffering any adverse consequences to his political fortunes. And damn the political fortunes of the Nationalist Party when he is no longer active in it.

But even in that scenario, Malta Today and its obsessive campaigning will rebound negatively on John Dalli’s reputation and image. People who cut off their nose to spite their face, caring not a jot about the wider consequences of their actions for the political party, the government and those who voted for it, tend to end up disliked and mistrusted. The so-called ‘rebel backbenchers’, for example, imagine themselves to be widely admired as folk heroes, when really they are pushing public opinion to the point where impatience tips into aggressive dislike.

They fail to understand that when you are in that sort of position, it is not enough to act as though you are some sort of champion of the disgruntled. You also have to show yourself to be clearly and unequivocally loyal, or you will be mistrusted and eventually despised by your own electors, who will perceive you to be acting not out of concern for them, but out of personal interest and worse, hostility towards your party leader.

It did not help John Dalli’s image at all when an interview which he gave to Malta Today last week was headlined with the quote, “I am the father-confessor to disgruntled MPs.” It helped his cause even less that the interview was preceded in the same edition by a large feature detailing a litany of complaints from those very same disgruntled MPs to whom he is a father-confessor, written up with no small bias by the man who left Net TV for a glittering career with Al Jazeera. He chose to include the observation, not backed up by facts, that in Nationalist Party clubs, Lawrence Gonzi’s picture is being turned to face the wall. One wonders, in that case, why it is not simply taken down.

It is disconcerting that in its keenness to portray the prime minister in as poor a light as possible, Malta Today uses tactics which weaken its own credibility. Last week’s front-page blazer was that Gonzi’s trust rating is in freefall – or as the newspaper put it, ‘in free fall’. “The lowest support ever for Gonzi as his trust rating falls eight points to 23% in just a year,” the headline trumpeted, rounding the figure upwards for maximum impact.

I turned the pages to find the actual numbers – precisely because Malta Today is so biased that I can’t rely on its interpretation and have to read the figures myself. Much to my astonishment, I found that the trust rating of both party leaders, and not just the one targeted by Malta Today, has fallen by almost exactly the same figure between September last year and last month: Joseph Muscat by 7.4 percentage points and Lawrence Gonzi by 7.8 percentage points. But of course, it was only Gonzi’s trust rating that was considered to be in freefall – or free fall.

As seasoned political analysts, the newspaper’s writers should know that the figure is far more alarming for Muscat than it is for Gonzi. He is freshly minted, young (ish), tells us he is progressive, is in opposition and not in government and so has to take no hard decisions, comes with promises attached, and yet – his trust rating was just 43.7% in September last year, and had plummeted by 9.1 percentage points to 34.6% by January. By last month he had recovered by a mere 1.7 percentage points, to 36.3%, a process which involved a ‘tremendous victory’ at the EP polls in June and the machinations of a ruthless and relentless public relations effort.

Muscat is Malta’s next prime minister, the great white hope of Labour victory, a man who has to make no unpopular decisions because he is in opposition, and yet his trust rating hovers dimly at a mere 36.3%, which means he isn’t even trusted by Labour’s core vote in its entirety.

Lawrence Gonzi’s trust rating fell from 30.8% in September last year to 27.8% in January to 23% last month. This means that his trust rating is 13.3 percentage points lower than that of his rival, and this accounts for Malta Today’s enthusiasm and that of less politically informed Labour voters. But Muscat himself will have read the figures pretty much as I have done, as will his political analysts and party strategists (though not, I hasten to add, Mrs Micallef, who will have taken the numbers at face value as Malta Today has done).

Muscat will have noted that a fall in the trust rating of both political leaders, over the same period and by the same number of percentage points, is not so much a reflection on the personal attributes of the men themselves, but an indication of widespread disillusionment with politics and politicians in general. This fits with the general sentiment of a ‘plague on both your houses’ which, because it is expressed more often in terms of resentment towards the decision-making government rather than anger towards the non-decision-making opposition, has been read by some among the Labour camp as a firm signal that Labour’s star is in the ascendant. The Malta Today survey shows that between September last year and last month, the percentage of respondents who trust neither party leader increased by 7.1 percentage points, from 8.5% to 15.6%.

Malta Today’s survey – and I back the newspaper’s claim that its figures have invariably proved to be reliable – is the clearest indication yet that Labour’s bluff and bluster about building a national movement of people from all walks of life masks the rather harsh reality that Muscat started out with a trust rating of just 43.7%, which is essentially Labour’s core vote, and now has a trust rating of 36.3%. He started out below par and instead of building up trust he has haemorrhaged it, and more crucially, he lost trust without having to take decisions that affect voters negatively, without having to take any decisions at all.

A figure I would have liked to see in that survey is trust levels for the parties, rather than only for their leaders. Lawrence Gonzi invariably ranked higher for trust than his party up until the last general election, while Alfred Sant invariably ranked lower (people trusted the Labour Party more than they trusted its leader, whereas the opposite was the case with the Nationalist Party). I am interested in seeing some numbers that show whether Muscat is more trusted than Labour, or Labour more trusted than Muscat.

Overall, what these figures show is that Joseph Muscat, with such a relatively low level of trust even at what should be the apex of his popularity, is headed for victory by default. That may be enough for him. He may have listened to the thinking-hats talk in which Edward de Bono described how, when two people are running from a grizzly bear, their survival depends not on running faster than the bear but on running faster than the other person. In other words, your success doesn’t depend on your speed so much as on the slowness of the other one.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.