The dead didn’t vote in Ireland, says Muscat
After he got Cuschieri's seat, he told him he had no money to employ him. Then he found the money to pay for Mrs Micallef.
The Irish have voted overwhelmingly for the Lisbon Treaty. It still needs the approval of Poland and the Czech Republic, but if that goes through, Malta will have its sixth seat in the European Parliament, which will go to Labour and Joseph Cuschieri – he who sacrificed his seat for Joseph Muscat.
In line with its new image that is made up mainly of telling us to forget the past (well, if I had a recent past that was so embarrassing and compromising, I wouldn’t want to remember it either), the Labour Party has been at pains to welcome the news of the Irish vote.
Its official statement does not include the suggestion that we should collate the number of people who voted against the treaty with those who abstained, those who invalidated their ballot sheet and those who are recently deceased but still on the electoral roll, as it is not the number of people who voted Yes that counts, but the number of people who didn’t.
This is strange, because the closest Joseph Muscat has come to acknowledging that the people of Malta voted for EU membership in the referendum rather than in the general election that followed, was last year – a full five years after the main event. And what he actually said was that, “with hindsight”, he thinks that the Yes vote “probably won”.
Fortunately, this time we don’t have to wait another five years for Muscat to deploy hindsight in assessing whether the Irish voted for the Lisbon Treaty, or whether the No votes, the abstentions, the dead and those who mucked up their ballot-paper are the ones who should be gathered up together and counted instead.
That’s because there’s something in the Irish Yes vote for his party: a seat in the EU parliament that will permit him, among other things, to get shot of that guilt-making former MP lurking in the wings looking for a source of income.
The need to find a paying occupation for Joseph Cuschieri has become even more pressing now that Mrs Micallef has been put on the party payroll. Let’s put it this way. Cuschieri was the fall-guy who was sweet-talked into giving up his seat in parliament so that Muscat could become leader of the opposition (you can be party leader without a seat in parliament, but you obviously can’t be leader of the opposition).
Heaven knows how they chatted him up, what they told him and promised him, how Jason Micallef massaged his ego and how Joseph Muscat gave him the full-on flirt. Then once he was out, and Muscat had what he wanted, Cuschieri found himself without income, without a job and with a handbag full of empty promises. He was told there was no job going for him at the party, that he couldn’t be employed there.
Then the next thing he hears, a woman who spent the best part of 13 years running Labour down in newspaper articles while holding public office – a political appointment and not the result of an open recruitment exercise – suddenly fetches up at the Labour Party’s door, is snatched inside and paid a rather comfortable salary.
Cuschieri and others would be thinking now, and I really don’t blame them, that while there is no money to employ the man who gave up his seat to enable Muscat to become prime minister, there is money to employ Marisa Micallef to play the role of a decoy duck in attracting other ducks like her to Muscat’s pond, where they will be shot, stuffed and displayed as trophies in Labour’s vetrina.
Or perhaps Muscat has simply paid for Mrs Micallef’s scalp, and doesn’t really expect her to do any work at all – but even so, if I were Cuschieri I would be really cross.
I imagine that this is where he learns the Used Lemon Lesson: they’ll squeeze you dry and chuck you away. Mrs Micallef knows this lesson already, and appears to have deployed it in reverse. She has squeezed one bag of lemons dry and when she couldn’t squeeze any more drops out of it earlier this year, she moved on to the next bag of lemons (and boy, what a bag of lemons it is).
So Joseph Muscat would have let out a great sigh of relief when the Irish voted Yes, and he wouldn’t have bothered counting the Nos, the abstentions, the dead on the roll, and the invalid votes, like he did in 2003 in Malta – something that his new fan-club of (dare I say it?) decidedly uncool nerds who think they’re edgy hipsters would prefer to forget.
And while we’re on the subject of nerds, I think that developments are fascinating. Muscat is hugely uncool but is under the impression that he is truly edgy.
As invariably happens in these situations – in the school playground, at university, in the workplace, in life in general – this type of person attracts others like him, who idolise him for the coolness they don’t know he hasn’t got; those who are on the far outer reaches of cooldom but who wish more than anything to be thought of as supremely cool.
The net result is that Muscat is collecting a rag-tag-bag of impossibly unhip people and he doesn’t realise it. Nobody who is really cool, hip or edgy would support Muscat. It is just too, too embarrassing for words. His coterie is made up entirely of try-hards.
By definition, if you try hard to be cool, then you aren’t.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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If Lawrence Gonzi and Paul Borg Olivier are cool, then I’m the President of the United States of America, heh.
[Daphne – Who said anything about them being cool? Read my piece again. Supporting Labour is the height of uncool, now more than ever because it’s become a magnet for frustrated, bored and bitter people in middle life who think that being in favour of divorce legislation is liberal politics rather than the universal political norm. Where such people go, hipness flees. This is not about the coolness of the leaders and secretaries-general, but about what our political choices say about us (and them). The Nationalist Party – and Lawrence Gonzi, bear in mind – got the overwhelming majority of the youth vote last year, while the middle-aged frumps (the worst kind of frumps, the ones who think they’re edgy) are skulking off to Labour. I think that says something, don’t you?]
I would appreciate a comment from Ms. Sharon Ellul Bonici.
I don’t know why all this fuss about Mrs. Marisa Micallef. She should be free to do what the hell she wants. I work in the cradle of the Labour Party. More or less, 95% don’t even know her or who she is, 3% are confusing her with you (Daphne); the few who know what is really happening don’t think she merits her salary, whatever it amounts to, or fits in with the Labour Party.
You seem to be saying, Karl, that 95% of those “in the cradle of the Labour Party” have no idea who someone in the public eye (long time chairman of the Housing Authority, long time newspaper columnist) is. That’s no mean indictment on the awareness of those in the cradle of the party.
Latest news: Joseph Muscat is taking people to the streets – deja vu all over again.
Joseph Muscat’s history is ambiguous at best. On the one hand we have the man who was adamantly against Malta joining the EU, while on the other, we have the man who rejoices at the positive result of the Irish vote.
He seems to operate on delay-mode, having relented somewhat and acknowledged – sort of – that the ‘Yes’ vote won in 2003, despite the fact that he couldn’t have become an MEP had the ‘yes’ vote not won. So why did it take him five years to acknowledge the obvious?
Which raises the question: which world is Muscat living in, these days? I think that his split personality allows him to flit between the world of opportunism and the world of illusion, thinking that bringing on board obsolete castaways and modern weather vanes gives his party a winning image.
Of course there are others who think the same way, such as Desmond Zammit Marmara whose blog-post on timesofmalta.com yesterday was called ‘The Labour Party – A National Movement’.
[Daphne – It’s called magical thinking: those who self-delude believe that if they say something enough times – ‘the Labour Party is a national movement’ – then it will become fact.]
Insightful article, Daphne. The boy/man has not yet begun to feel the ‘heat’. Cool? Nerds with beards? Misguided Ms’s? Labour die-hards are sharpening their knives. The blues haven’t yet unsheathed theirs. Over three years to go. Should be fun. Good luck to the gnome; he’ll need it.
Another insightful article. I have a problem understanding what does Labour stands for now. Under Fenech Adami’s leadership the PN adopted and enhanced generously the social benefits introduced by Labour. The PN even outdide the MLP with the long list of social programmes. What type of change does Joseph Muscat have in mind, may I ask? Does he want to do away with these social programmes so we can have change? To expand the economy, the PN is liberalising it. Is Joseph Muscat’s plan to micromanage the economy as his predecessors did, so that we can see a contraction and a change? Muscat has done very well academically but he lacks maturity to run a country.
That inane grin on the cover of this ridicolous attempt at an early biography of the nonentity says it all, doesn’t it?
It may seem inane to you, but it’s the Maltese grin of success. It’s not only Muscat who has it.
How come a referendum decision by the Irish a year ago was overturned a year later? Can there be another referendum next year which could overturn this year’s result? The same happened in 2004 or 2003 when 10 new countries joined the EU. First the Irish said NO and a year later (or less) said yes.
[Daphne – The turn-out was extremely low last year. Basically, the Nos were motivated to vote and they were the ones who turned up. This year, there was motivation among the Yeses, too.]
Imma, allura, can another referendum be held next year with the same question and the Nos win? Ma jridux jghaddu ghaxar snin biex jerga jsir referendum fuq l-istess haga?
Joseph Muscat just made the biggest mistake of his life by employing Marisa Micallef. Big, big gaffe.