Jeffrey’s D-Day is 11th August

This is my column in The Malta Independent, today.

Somehow, in all of this, I am left with the feeling that Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando) is desperate to tie up all his loose ends before 11th August, when he ties the knot with Labour activist Carmen Ciantar, the woman who sits behind party leader Joseph Muscat during his Sunday rallies

He has filed a suit against the Registrar to have his official name changed from Jeffrey Pullicino, which is what it is now, to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando Smith.

He has struck a deal with the Opposition and forced the resignation of the man he thinks is his nemesis. Now he is in a hurry to have that same man expelled from the Nationalist Party, telling the party executive committee that it is a matter of urgency and must be sorted out immediately.

His appearances on television and in the media are becoming more frequent and more absurd. On TVAM last Monday, he looked as though he hadn’t slept for a week, his face swollen, his eyes like slits, and his speech slow and deliberate.

I believe that he has set himself some kind of cut-off point in his mind: the equivalent of blowing up the room with everyone in it, turning the gun on himself, and then being reborn to another life.

From what I know of him and how he operates, I’ll say that he wants to end all this, marry his second Labour Party wife in a few weeks, and start a new chapter under a Labour government.

Now, after his latest bit of obsessive persecution, it’s about time reporters and interviewers began putting Jeffrey Pullicino into context instead of treating him like a normal and rational person with views as legitimate as those of the next man.

His credibility is at rock-bottom even with Labour supporters and Labour politicians, who can see him for what he is, but find in him a handy tool that can be thrown away after the general election.

We are almost in Norman Lowell territory here. When Lowell was treated by the press as though he were a sound and stable person with rational views, the result was a spate of highly dangerous arson attacks on those with whom Lowell did not agree.

It was only after those arson attacks, in which people could have died, that Lowell fizzled out into oblivion and the press wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole. But the damage had been done.

The medium is the message: if you frame a cracked personality in the context of normality, that is what people pick up, and that is Jeffrey Pullicino’s objective as he show-boats on every television show that will have him, speaks to newspapers, releases statements and gives interviews.

The more intelligent and perceptive readers and viewers will not see Jeffrey Pullicino as normal, stable or justified just because he is presented as such.

Instead, they will suffer dissonance between the context in which he is presented to them – as a perfectly sane politician with valid issues of national importance – and all the verbal and non-verbal clues they pick up by watching and listening to him, which tell a very different story.

They will also be most unimpressed by the stuck-record repetition of his grudges and of the names he lists over and over again, sometimes several times on the same television slot. He sees this as credibility and consistency. But some of us recognise it for what it is – sheer, unadulterated neurosis – largely because we have had occasion to observe it in others before.

Only the other day, when I waited at the health centre, there was one woman who dominated the waiting-room with a well-rehearsed litany of the wrongs that had been done to her, oblivious to the fact that others were tuning her out and were very irritated. It wasn’t a conversation she wanted, but an audience for a diatribe she had obviously repeated so many times before. When she went into the nurses’ room, we could hear her through the door, repeating it all again, this time with the poor nurses as a fresh audience.

But the trouble for Jeffrey Pullicino is that his audience is always the same one. And we are thoroughly sick of him.

It has reached the point where we’re actually rooting for him to turn that gun on himself and pull the trigger – metaphorically speaking, of course, I hasten to add for the benefit of those of my critics who speak English as a foreign language and are looking for reasons to get upset.