Carnival country

Robert Musumeci, unable to face the fact that his political career has blown up in his face because of his own ill-advised personal choices and behaviour, is now trying to blame others for having ruined his future in the Nationalist Party.

Well, what can I say?

There’s always Labour.

I’m sure Joseph Muscat will be thrilled to have him, along with all the other semi-useless rejects he’s been gathering up along the way.

By switching to Labour, Musumeci will at least eradicate the tensions between his social life and political loyalty that have beset him for the last few years, when he came across as a man torn two ways and perhaps even one who has been manipulated in a particular direction, to the detriment of the political party and government which he – on the face of it, at least – is bound over to support.

There is little that can be said of Musumeci but that his short life so far has been the quintessential Greek tragedy. He had it all, and he blew it away.

Five years ago he was the golden boy with so much potential and political promise. But because of a series of truly unwise decisions in various areas of his life and work, he’s blown it.

At least he has the consolation that he can carry on with the business of being a successful and popular architect.

The curious thing is that he seems to think he has a right to do as he does without facing the consequences.

He doesn’t think there should be consequences. He appears to be one of those people who believe that just because something is legal – or rather, not illegal – than it is acceptable, justifiable or moral. And the rest of us can’t say anything about it.

That’s hardly the case.

Perhaps Musumeci should ask himself why he trailed in so weakly in the general election two years ago.

It wasn’t the MEPA-related scandals, which only erupted later under the stewardship of Astrid Vella and her organisation.

It was, quite possibly, because people didn’t like what was going on in the rest of his life.

It is my view that the Nationalist Party should never have accepted Robert Musumeci to stand on its ticket in that general election.

It was wrong, even deceitful, for a political party to put forward to the trusting electorate somebody packaged as a decent family man when it turned out shortly afterwards that he was not, and when the party knew at the time what was going on.

It was a time-bomb, waiting to explode.

Now Musumeci is trapped, face-to-face with the knowledge that actions have consequences, sometimes quite serious ones.

A series of little actions that seem inconsequential at the time sometimes snowball and their effect is exponential. He has roped in the newspaper Malta Today in his efforts at fighting back, but it is pointless.

If the newspaper continues to fight his battle, it won’t win his case – for there isn’t one to be won – but it will lose its credibility, or the little it has left.

Musumeci’s latest line is that the ‘coterie’ who targeted John Dalli is now targeting him. That’s a line bound to go down well with Malta Today, but it is foolish.

He knows that what started this was his mistress’s deeply unwise decision to talk too much, and about the wrong sort of things, at a dinner party which the two hosted, when she knew that I would have the news within minutes.

I did. Somebody actually texted me from the dinner-table. I am not to blame for Robert Musumeci’s choice of mistress, or the fact that her lack of discretion, to say nothing of her historic spitefulness and her love of playing chess-games with people, perhaps due to very different political views, might sink a couple of ships along the way.

It was sheer coincidence that it came to happen in the run-up to the casual election to fill John Dalli’s seat. I did not choose the date for the dinner party hosted by Musumeci and his mistress, Magistrate Herrera, nor did I press his mistress’s buttons and make her speak as she did.

Malta Today is now making a great deal of fuss because the prime minister – or so it reports; I cannot have this information confirmed – has told Robert Musumeci that he is unfit to stand for the casual election on the PN ticket, and would he please retire from the race.

The newspaper says that the prime minister was wrong to do this on the basis of my ‘malicious allegations’, and that the request is pointless anyway, because Musumeci, with the votes as they are and his rival getting most second preferences from John Dalli, has no chance of being elected.

This shows how skewed and corrupted Malta Today’s thinking has become.

That Musumeci has not enough votes to get into parliament is one issue. That he is unfit to stand on the PN ticket is another. The point the prime minister would have wished to make – if indeed he did make it – is that somebody of Musumeci’s character taints the PN ticket merely by standing on it, even if he has no chance of winning.

This message should have been communicated to Musumeci in February two years ago, but I am beginning to think that the prime minister had no idea at the time of what his candidate was doing, and may have put it down to gossip until Musumeci left his wife to set up home with the magistrate some months later, and then it became incontrovertible.

I find it hard to accept that the prime minister might have known of the affair and still allowed Musumeci to contest in his party’s name, putting electors in a position where they were voting for one thing and getting another.

There is lots of talk about cleaning up politics, but this is how it is done.

If the prime minister requested Robert Musumeci not to taint the PN ticket with his presence on it, then he was correct to do so. It may have been rather late in the day, but it was better done than not done at all.

It may come as a surprise to Malta Today, but there are more people who think that way than there are people who think like Robert Musumeci.

Those people are now desperate for decisive action. Sometimes, a tipping-point is reached, and this is one of them.

Malta Today and the Labour Party are foolish not to understand that the average person is more than able to draw a distinction between liberal and progressive politics and what they see as disreputable, even immoral, behaviour.

Saviour Balzan, writing in his newspaper last Sunday, issued the threat that if this is the way things are going, then he would reveal secrets from the cupboards of other politicians, tit for tat.

He seems to think that this would be a bad thing, when I would think that most of his readers see things differently: that concealing the secrets of politicians who are legislators or who seek to be legislators is the bad thing.

Unwittingly, Balzan has revealed just why this unspoken pact not to reveal politicians’ secrets works against the interests of the public. So many people have something on each other that the potential for blackmail, arm-twisting, threats, favours and manipulation is huge.

Malta Today and Labour should have understood this when they saw that Robert Musumeci survived any number of sustained attacks on his involvement with controversial development projects and certain MEPA permits. But it was the development of his relationship with his current mistress -at 10 years his senior she is unlikely to remain his permanent one – that undermined him completely in the public mind.

For that, he alone is responsible.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.