Oh dear, Joseph Cuschieri is losing patience

Tajjeb li tkun taf: if I don't get my seat, Manwel will bite yours

Yes, Joseph Cuschieri is losing patience because a space hasn’t been cleared for him yet in the European Parliament, and the rest of us are supposed to give a damn.

Judging by the reams of mocking comments beneath the internet reports about his stern letter to Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament, there aren’t many candidates for self-immolation on his behalf. Well, petrol is rather expensive these days. And have you seen the price of milk? Shocking.

Cuschieri is seen largely as the poor stooge who was suckered into giving up his seat in the Maltese parliament so that the new Labour leader could squirm into it and become leader of the Opposition.

So the general reaction is “You brought it on yourself, Joseph Cuschieri. You were chewed up and spat out and you have only yourself to blame.”

For two years and more, this man has been hanging around waiting to be given something to do. Joseph Muscat promised to find him a job by phoning business people and putting pressure on them, just like old-style politicians used to do. But that got nowhere because there isn’t much on offer for an ex Magic Kiosk waiter. And then they tried to shut him up by selecting him as a candidate for the EP elections, but that too blew up in their faces until the earth moved and Malta got a sixth seat. Except that we haven’t got it yet, and that’s why Cuschieri is hopping.

Cuschieri feels he is owed something, because he gave up his seat and his income. But the only person who owes Cuschieri anything is Joseph Muscat, who owes him everything.

And let’s not get started on discussing what sort of political party allows into the leadership contest a man who doesn’t even have a seat in parliament, when without a seat in parliament you can’t be leader of the Opposition.

So what was the Labour Party thinking of doing, exactly, if it couldn’t sucker some stooge into giving up his seat to make way for a leader who was not elected by the people? I’m guessing that, in the Labour Party’s time-honoured tradition of acting first and thinking later, it had no Plan Z.

George Abela would have had the same problem.

The contenders for the Nationalist Party leadership, eight years ago, all had a seat in the house. Lawrence Gonzi didn’t have to lay a guilt-trip on anyone to give up his seat and make way for him, and John Dalli wouldn’t have had to either if he had been elected.

But praise the Lord, he wasn’t.

As tends to be the case with these things, Cuschieri is now projecting his anger at the wrong target. Perhaps in private he is eaten up with rage every time he sees Muscat prancing about on some stage or standing up in parliament to ask, in the manner of somebody born with a silver spoon in his mouth, why everybody doesn’t just donate their pay rise to charity.

Perhaps he looks at him and thinks, his blood boiling: “Hey, that’s my seat! And you have my salary, pay increase and all.”

But you know what? I don’t think so. The man is too naive, for want of a better word, and that is precisely why Joseph Muscat and his people performed a pincer movement on him. They weren’t exactly going to get far had they asked Anglu Farrugia for his seat, or that Silvio Parnis, for example – you know the one, with gelled hair, who hands out plastic roses to the track-suited ladies at the school-gates when polling day draws near.

In a way, I feel sad for Cuschieri. His is the classic story of the underprivileged kid who got trampled upon and used by the privileged kid, who pretended to offer him friendship while despising him for his gullibility (“Why would I want to be friends with someone like you?”) and then dumped him once he had got what he wanted.

The two Josephs couldn’t have had a more different childhood. Cuschieri spent most of his raised in an institution by members of a religious order, deprived of all material advantages. Muscat was the only golden child of a rich fireworks merchant. He wanted for nothing and even had a house with a swimming-pool built and paid for by his parents before he turned 25.

He was privileged even in politics, smarming up to Sant the party leader and becoming his golden boy and poodle, running around telling us to vote against EU membership and producing a Super One show about the evils of ‘Brussel’.

The champion-of-the-underdog in me naturally wants to root for Cuschieri against the clinical way he was used, but I can’t. Let them all eat each other alive, I say.

If Muscat speaks of his wife as though she is a useful household appliance {“I am also extremely grateful that she is never too busy to put my ambitions first” – Joseph Muscat speaking about his spouse to The Malta Economic Update), he is not likely to have many qualms about the fact that he put a man out of a job so that he could become prime minister. He would see that as the means justifying the end of satisfying his ambitions first and foremost.

Cuschieri is dismayed because there have been delays in opening up a sixth seat for Malta in the European Parliament, but when that eventually happens, the seat is his. Heaven alone knows what sort of a hash he’ll make of it, but if you vote for monkeys, you get peanuts.

You can’t blame him for not being up to much. You can only blame the people who voted for him, who probably aren’t much better. Well, what sort of a person do you have to be to think that Cuschieri will make the ideal representative for Malta in the European Parliament?

Probably the sort of person who thought that Dom Mintoff would make an amazing prime minister. Or the sort of person who firmly believes that we’re worse off today than we were in the 1980s.

Labour – you just have to give up. As I wrote not so long ago, the party is not fit for purpose, and no amount of griping about the present government is going to obscure that fact.

First they elect a leader who doesn’t have a seat in the house, and then they make a big production out of finding a job and a salary for the man they dislodged to make way for him.

I have a solution. Joseph Muscat, only son of a fireworks merchant, is so comfortably off that he can keep two children at one of the most expensive private schools in the country, maintain a household of four people, and take cruises and holidays without his wife having to work.

Instead of telling the nation grandly that he doesn’t need more money and will donate his salary increase to charity, why doesn’t he donate it to Joseph Cuschieri and help give us a break from his whining?

After all, I am morally convinced – to borrow a phrase from Alfred Sant – that it is really his.

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