Proset, Perit! U r sexy!!!!

Architects of disaster: will we ever be shot of these two, or are they going to haunt us forever?

This was my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Watching Karmenu ‘Il-Guy’ Vella on Bondi+ the night before last was the oddest experience.

His performance would have shattered the notion held by so many people who don’t vote Labour: that he is a nice and reasonable, well, guy.

The people who thought this of him before last Tuesday are the sorts who don’t really think too hard about things.

What would a nice and reasonable fellow have been doing on the back of a lorry with Dom Mintoff or carried shoulder high by the crowd alongside – deep breath here – premier Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici?

All the nice and reasonable fellows were at home or at work (if they had any), trying their best to cope in those ruinous times. Or they were on the Opposition benches, trying to get Malta out of the clutches of Il-Guy and his cohorts.

But that was then and this is now.

Don’t let’s talk about the past, the Labour Party tells us. Progressive people talk about the future.

So let’s compromise and speak about the present. And in the present, Karmenu Vella is writing – endlessly – the Labour Party’s programme for government post-2013, and he was on Bondi+ to explain it.

We didn’t get much in the way of facts. We didn’t even get much in the way of information of any other kind. But we did find out why this electoral programme is so very long in the making (a contemporary Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in a fraction of the time): the man hasn’t got a clue.

That’s right: he doesn’t know where to start. He’s out of his depth.

Of course he is.

It was quite frightening, actually. The reality is that Labour is almost certain to win the next general election – excepting the arrival of a fortuitous deus ex machina or the discovery by people that perhaps they don’t really want to cut off their noses to spite their faces, after all.

This means that whatever electoral programme Il-Guy – who confuses billions with millions and vice versa – comes up with is the programme for the running of our lives in that post-Apocalyptic scenario.

Several times, the camera caught the dumbfounded, nonplussed look on interviewer Bondi’s face. Il-Guy’s Facebook friends misinterpreted this and immediately flooded his Facebook wall to praise and admire their man for leaving ‘dak Loo’ speechless.

It didn’t occur to them for a minute that they had misread both the facial expression and the reasons for it. But the prize for the best of those comments has to go to the Facebook friend who wrote ‘You r sexy!!!’

Excuse me, madam, you might well be a gerontophiliac, but that’s hardly the point.

Il-Guy should have used that show – and boy, what an opportunity it was, just as it was for Anglu Farrugia, who blew it too – to speak to Maltese television’s very elusive ABC1 audience.

ABC1 viewers watch very little Maltese television because they prefer the rest of what’s available through cable, or because they tend to watch hardly any television at all. One of the few shows they watch is Bondi+, so if you want to catch them at all, you’ve got to catch them then.

Il-Guy made a major mistake when he chose instead to speak as though to a typical Super One audience. So, for example, he repeatedly and patronisingly told Bondi that he should be patient and keep quiet while he – Il-Guy – explained things to him.

Or that Bondi doesn’t understand things because he doesn’t give Il-Guy a chance to explain them to him.

He forgot that there was an audience out there, made up in the main of people who, like Bondi, don’t need Il-Guy to explain anything to them at all, quite apart from whether he has actually written one bit of policy. But there you go.

Instead he chose to address the kind of people who vote Labour already and don’t need to be convinced of his ability to write a stupendous electoral programme….or of his sexiness.

Bondi made valiant attempts to point out that he was speaking to the wrong audience: “The people who watch this show know already what a living wage is”, “please focus and answer the question”, and so on. It was to no avail.

I sat there trying to work out why Il-Guy was so determinedly ‘speaking Super One’ and not making the slightest bit of effort to talk to Disillusioned From Sliema or Fed-Up In Swieqi, until the suspicion began to creep in that this is all he knows. Karmenu Vella doesn’t know how to speak to Disillusioned From Sliema and Fed-Up in Swieqi.

For decades he has been accustomed to acolytes hanging onto his every word, with even smart pillars of society pretending to admire his views and pithy observations – the equivalent of a gold-digger laughing at a rich man’s jokes – and he actually thinks that he’s the business.

But in the harsh glare of a television interview, he is exposed for what he is: a man born in 1950 trying to reinvent himself for a 2013 comeback as finance minister when he was first a minister in Mintoff’s 1970s cabinet, a period he unashamedly describes, on Facebook, as the Golden Years.

He doesn’t know whether he is coming or going. He is torn between naked admiration of the current government, for he is a businessman before he is a politician (one quote: “Gonzi ghamel ahjar minn Fenech Adami”) and the need to justify his personal and political choices in the Mintoff and KMB years, to say nothing of his presence in Sant’s disastrous cabinet of government.

But perhaps the greatest signifier of his inadequate intelligence – and when you really think about it, lack of real intelligence is what kept those people in Mintoff’s and KMB’s cabinets, quite apart from lack of scruples – is his inability to think on his feet and pre-empt the next question.

Worse than that, he laid traps for himself during the interview. “We’re not saying there’s no money,” he said. “Of course there’s money, and lots of it. All those billions! It’s just that the government isn’t spending them wisely.”

“And where do those billions come from?” Bondi asked. Carried away on his own flow, Il-Guy didn’t see the next one coming. “From taxes, of course,” he replied. “I see,” Bondi said. “They come from taxes, despite the country being wrecked.”