Franco, whichever way you look at it, it’s over

This is my column in The Malta Independent, today.

One of the surest signs of true intelligence is the ability to think ahead and foresee consequences, and then tailor your actions accordingly.

That’s why I’m always surprised when people say that Franco Debono is intelligent, basing their opinion mainly on his own assessment of his abilities, Form II report and all.

He has painted himself into a corner with such spectacular skill that not even Alfred Sant could hope to compete were he still part of the story of the Labour Party, instead of being sidelined as his enemies, including Sceberras Trigona, move to the fore.

Debono is a lawyer and like most lawyers he plays about with words and meaning (“That’s not what I said; that’s what you understood me to mean”). But he is not a chess-player and nor do I think he is intelligent. As Labour MEP John Attard Montalto, himself a chess player from childhood, wrote recently in a newspaper piece, chess teaches you that wishful thinking is punished.

Debono is merely a street-fox out to fend for himself, fuelled by frustrated ambition and thinking only in the short term. He doesn’t have the killer instinct of the coldly ambitious. If he did, he would know that as determined killers of this nature make their way to their calculated target, they are generally silent about their intentions. They might even smile at their targets and befriend them, or curry favour until they usurp them.

It is those who are not particularly bright, like Dom Mintoff and Franco Debono, who rely on loud bullying and ultimatums to get their way. The difference, which Debono cannot see precisely because he is not clever, is that Mintoff stood a good chance of becoming party leader when he behaved towards Boffa the way Debono is now behaving towards Gonzi. But Debono stands no chance at all.

Debono’s nemesis, Joseph Muscat, has the coldness, the ability to put everything and everyone aside while fixated on his target. The problem for him and for the rest of us is that his killer instinct does not come coupled with intelligence and creative goals. It is empty and egocentric.

Though Debono still thinks he plays a zero-sum game in which he gambles all on the prospect of becoming party leader – he was so thrilled that he ranked marginally above that other sore loser, John Dalli, in a poll about the party leadership carried out for Malta Today some weeks ago – the reality is that, except in his own dreams, he is finished.

He carries on as though he is going to contest another general election on the Nationalist Party ticket no matter how badly he behaves. More unbelievably still, he speaks as though the decision to contest on the PN ticket is his to make, and his party’s views do not come into it.

He calls the shots now because he holds the single seat in parliament that makes for the government’s majority. But when parliament is dissolved and he no longer has that seat, he loses all his leverage. At that point, he is a cornered rat.

I have no doubt that Debono has been allowed to think that he is welcome as a candidate in the upcoming general election, even though he told the world that he resigned his party whip “many times” but his resignation was “not accepted”. That was rubbish, too. If an MP wants to resign the party whip, nothing and nobody can stop him doing it. He doesn’t need permission or to have his resignation accepted. He just sticks to his guns and goes right ahead and does it.

I don’t blame the Nationalist Party for allowing him to think this way, even though it’s not the course of action I would have chosen or thought recommendable. Men like Franco Debono need a boot up the rear end because it’s the only language they understand and, more to the point, the only attitude they respect. The Nationalist Party probably thinks that appeasement is the best way to avoid more scenes, and in so doing, makes a tighter noose for its own neck.

But when a general election is called and parliament is dissolved, there is no need to pacify this grotesque ego any longer, and at that point – with all his leverage gone and no more scope for tantrums – Debono should be deselected in as casually dismissive a fashion as possible.

If I were the party leader or secretary-general, I wouldn’t even bother with a mobile phone text message. I would simply ensure that the list of candidates is published without his name on it. Then I would set my phone to automatically reject his number.

Debono is so far gone that yesterday he allowed the leader of the Opposition to sit next to him on the government benches and get into deep consultation for at least 15 minutes. What’s wrong with this, people argued online – don’t politicians from different sides of the house have drinks together in the parliament bar, talk at parties and go out to dinner with each other?

These are the sorts of people who understand nothing of symbolism and statements, to whom a parliament house is a waste of money and not the most important symbol of a country’s democracy, who talk and laugh on the church parvis at funerals, and who, when they have caused offence, always want to know what the fuss is about.

Muscat and Debono are free to have intense conversations in the parliament bar – and quite frankly, even that would be a problem if it’s not small-talk about the weather, foreign affairs or the children. But when the leader of the Opposition casually sits down on the government benches, as though he belongs there, and has a private conversation with a government MP who is threatening to bring down that government, this is a very public statement.

It is a statement which is intentionally insulting, a power-game. Mintoff used this tactic all the time, right up to the point where he brought down the Labour government because he wished to insult Alfred Sant. It might take years, but people like this are generally hoist by their own petard.

We have all had it up to here with Franco Debono – yes, even those supporters of the Labour Party who rooted for him because they thought he would bring down Gonzi and elevate Muscat to the premiership. It’s reached the point where many would rather have an early election than be forced to watch more of Debono’s party tricks.

But when faced with the possibility of an early election as a direct result of the threats he himself makes, Debono panics and says, as he did two days ago, that there’s no need for that. No need for an early election, he said, if the prime minister gives in to him.

Smart, eh? Not at all. If the prime minister calls an early election – or even an election at the appointed hour – that’s the end of Franco Debono. What will become of his plans and objectives then?

More to the point, what will become of him? Unlike with Dom Mintoff, the other man who brought down his own government, we will not be talking about him still in 14 years’ time. He will have become dead to memory by then, having to content himself with a life of anonymity and the occasional mention as a footnote to a report on a prosecution. Franco Tabone who? Oh him.