A splendid cruise to inspire the starving masses

Joseph and Michelle Muscat appear to have decided on the Eva Peron approach to political PR: turn yourself into the stuff of dreams so that the starving peasants can live vicariously through you even as their ketone levels surge and they scrabble around for woodlice to turn into a nice stew for supper.

“Look, a couple of peasants like us have made it to the top! They wear nice (ahem) clothes and drive expensive cars and have a house with a swimming pool and go on cruises and hobnob with gay professors at the Sorbonne to whom they speak French! There’s hope for us all. Pass me the roasted rats.”

I don’t think so. And yet I can’t think of any other reason why Joseph Muscat would behave the way he does, taking a cruise on the MSC Splendida (“the leviathan of the high seas” – Malta agent, Hamilton Travel) and then two days after his return early last Wednesday have his party declare that “ordinary families are not feeling the economic growth that the government boasts about”.

Oh my, so his family must be extraordinary then.

So, OK, the Labour Party planned to keep quiet about the fact that ‘Labour Leader Doctor Joseph Muscat and his wife Mrs Michelle Muscat’ were taking a cruise while the rest of us cooked our toe-nail trimmings for supper and drank tap-water.

They led us to believe that he was stuck at home because the gremlins had stolen all the nation’s crutches.

Even on September 8, The Times reported that the Labour leader was absent from the official Victory Day commemoration ‘because of his leg’. And this when he had descended the gangway of the MSC Splendida at Valletta at eight o’ clock that same morning.

You’d think that the absence from the ceremonies of Mrs ‘Deputy Leader’ Muscat would have been a clue to the media that it wasn’t his leg that was keeping her husband away. Or why would she have not breached procedure once more to represent the Labour Party? But no, picking up clues is too much to ask.

The Muscats’ cover was blown after somebody who works down at the wharf saw them board the cruise-liner and let me know, and I then wrote about it on my blog. The story received a great number of hits, no doubt from people who, like me, had long suspected that The Leg was just an excuse to play hookey.

At that point, the Labour Party should have trashed the standard press response that Muscat couldn’t mark Victory Day with the rest of the big cheeses ‘because of his leg’. You don’t go on with the lies once the truth is out. But that requires a certain amount of intelligence, even if very little of it, and that’s in short supply given Labour’s choice of advisers.

After I broke the news that Joseph and Michelle were not indisposed at all but off cruising the Med, Labour’s communications officer should have scrapped the speech about ‘ordinary families’ not being able to make ends meet. I hate to sound rude, but honestly, what is Labour communications man Kurt Farrugia’s role exactly – that of dwarf jester at the court of King Joseph?

He’s hopeless.

He has allowed the party to declare here that Joseph Muscat’s is not an ordinary family but an extraordinary one which remains immune to the vagaries of economic turmoil. He and Michelle can take a Mediterranean cruise because they’re all right, Jack, while those ordinary folks he talks about do no more than take out a pedal-boat at Ghadira because of GonziPN.

Shame we don’t all sell fireworks chemicals for a living or have friends like Norman Hamilton of Hamilton Travel, agents for the leviathan of the high seas.

It would be wise, at this point, to publish the receipt for payment for that cruise. Well, not the receipt, because that can be meaningless, but an authenticated copy of the bank-processed cheque – and then we’ll have to take it on trust that Norman Hamilton didn’t refund the money.

You never know what people might think otherwise. They might think what they thought about the finance minister taking a trip as the guest of a businessman on his private jet, or the PN secretary-general going for a spin aboard a yacht owned by another businessman.

And then Joseph Muscat will look like a two-faced hypocrite. Can’t have that, can we?

Talking about poor people while you consume luxury is fine if you’re a merchant princess with inherited wealth doing a bit of charity work here and there, or Angelina Jolie visiting the gutters of Calcutta in her role as UN ambassador. It is not fine if you are a political leader and a socialist, even if you did grow up privileged and pretend otherwise.

The Nationalist Party retaliated to Labour’s ‘ordinary folks’ spiel with the statement that the Labour Party is detached from reality, that it seems unaware of how relatively unscathed Malta has been by the international crisis.

Ah, but there’s always a market for fireworks, which is the Muscat family business, though let’s leave that aside for now because we’re not talking about whether political leaders should be allowed to have money. Of course they should, even if they’re socialist and want to deny that right to everyone else, like Ebenezer Mintoff, living in squalor while squirreling away his riches.

But here’s the thing: Mintoff got it right at first, the cunning fox.

When he sallied forth to harangue the starving masses tal-mahkumin, he gave no indication that he was richer by far than the sinjuri against whom he incited them. Had you told any one of his frenzied fans, back in the 1970s, that he was a rich man (he still is) they would not have believed you.

He didn’t do it out of good manners, because the man has none. He did it for political expediency.

But then Mintoff took it to extremes and that’s when the problems began: when he imposed his personal stinginess on the rest of the country. There’s a difference between living simply and the inherent stinginess which eventually caused his need to keep up a thrifty image as socialist leader to spiral completely out of control into a notoriously squalid standard of living.

Political leaders are meant to show sensitivity to the times they live in and to the stresses and distresses of the electorate. Some people call it hypocrisy. Those who know better see it as simple good manners: not flaunting your good fortune in the face of those who are far less fortunate and who might be having a hard time.

Michelle Obama keeps it simple. You get no sense that she’s thinking to herself “Yippee! Now I can really splash out and live a thrilling life and hang around with all the important people and rock stars and singers and live in smashing houses and take amaaaaaaazing holidays.”

There’s nothing of the ‘Cherie Blair’ about her.

Nicolas Sarkozy has come under heavy fire for larking around on gadzillionaire’s yachts, wearing heavy gold Rolexes and marrying an expensive handbag. The French press have nicknamed him President Bling.

Samantha Cameron, despite having a considerable personal income, will not be seen in anything more expensive than a dress from Jigsaw. The British prime minister’s wife can’t parade before the cameras in clothes that cost thousands of pounds when the most other women can splash out on in the current economic climate is a couple of pieces from (wildly successful) Primark.

Earlier this year, Sweden’s Social Democrat Party leader Mona Sahlin made the national news and had her morals called into doubt (that’s Sweden for you) after she was photographed carrying a red Louis Vuitton handbag. Not just Vuitton, but red! Red, despite being the colour of socialism, is not considered suitable for wear during a recession. It is a boom-time colour; it was THE colour of the 1980s bull market.

One newspaper shrieked that Sahlin’s handbag cost $898. Imagine if they knew what a Vuitton bag really costs. Tacking a nought onto that figure would be more like it, unless Sahlin bought it at some mega sale.

“A Social Democrat party leader must always think first of social equality,” the left-wing writer Göran Greider told one newspaper. “Consumerism comes from the rich. And the knock-on effect is that people (who are not rich) borrow money to be able to buy the same things. That’s why political leaders, especially from the left, must have a certain amount of responsibility. They need to be careful.”

Sahlin’s press secretary told another newspaper that her boss didn’t pay for the bag. “It was given to her by a friend for her 50th birthday,” she said.

Well, same difference.

Sweden’s former equality ombudsman leapt gallantly to Sahlin’s defence. “Had it been a man with a bag in the same price category no one would have reacted this way,” he said, as the newspaper which quoted him pointed out that prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt owns a briefcase which cost roughly as much, a gift from – what a surprise – President Bling of France.

Ah, but what if the briefcase were red and noticeably by Louis Vuitton? Now that would have been different.

If Joseph and Michelle had any sense or proper advisers, they would have taken the twins for a few days to a mid-priced hotel in Gozo and called in the photographers to publicise the news to those ordinary families they talk about, instead of trying (and failing) to hide a luxury cruise on a liner for which Norman Hamilton is the Malta agent.

Their attempt at hiding the information from the public can have had nothing to do with a need for privacy, for these are the people who told us how their children were conceived and delivered and who invited photographers into their home.

They kept shtum because a little bird nagging there at the back of their brain told them it isn’t such a great idea to take a cruise while complaining that the people are starving . And the little bird was right.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.