Piccolo Mondo di Franco Debono

This is my column in The Malta Independent, today.

So Franco Debono – a name that has begun to take on tones of a cuss-word – gave the surest indication yet that he intends to carry on sulking and brooding for the rest of this government’s term in office, by being the only government MP not to stand behind the prime minister in the group photograph after Monday’s vote.

A man of some intelligence would have seen the wisdom in standing with the rest of his team on that occasion, if only to better serve his narrow personal interests, but Debono appears to prefer self-sabotage, deluding himself that it is the opposite.

I was told, by one of his childhood contemporaries, a possibly apocryphal story of their street cock-fighting days in Hal Ghaxaq. Debono had a “serduq champion”, which always won. When another urchin acquired a champion-beating cock, and Debono saw that his – oh dear, I had better use another word here – rooster was in the process of being pecked to oblivion, he jumped into the ring, grabbed his – here we go again – rooster, and ran off with it, breaking all the rules because he couldn’t face losing.

The observation I made to the person who told me this fascinating story was that I’m surprised it wasn’t the winning cock that he snatched and ran off with. He seems to want what others have without really knowing why.

Anybody who believes that Debono will morph into a normal person, after voting to signal his confidence in the government led by a prime minister he has publicly mocked and derided even as he sat with him in parliament, is naive or just hoping for the best.

Here we speak of a personality problem and not a situational difficulty. The personality will not change even if the circumstances are resolved. Franco Debono’s hunger is so great that he will consume himself to satisfy it. It is a dangerous hunger because it is not for material things. The yawning gap within is emotional, and so it can never be filled.

As Mark-Anthony Falzon, head of the University of Malta’s Department of Sociology, said to The Times afterwards: “Franco Debono can be relied upon to be unreliable, reckless and brooding. The issue is the person himself, and he is still very much there.”

We can certainly expect Debono to launch a verbal attack on this university lecturer during his next interminable and wandering speech in parliament, telling us that the country is not run by sociologists and asking what sociologists know of important law reforms like his.

His frustration at the fact that there is nothing legal which he can do to bring down his actual and perceived enemies outside parliament is quite palpable.

There are times when I half expect to wake in the morning and find him squawking at the gate, but this is unlikely as he is too much of a coward even to ring me any longer after the first couple of times I hit the reject button. He knows or suspects that I will only hit reject again, and if there is one thing this man can’t take, it is rejection.

It blasts that fragile thing, his ego, to such a great extent that he will do anything to avoid situations in which he will feel rejected, even attacking before possible rejection occurs.

If Debono inadvertently finds himself in situations where he is subjected to treatment which he interprets as rejection, even if it normal business for normal people, he is fired up with a seething, simmering need to wreak vengeance and reclaim for himself some balance of the ego.

So we are going to have more of Franco until the electorate does the necessary and boots him out, leaving him free to throw his weight around in the Piccolo Mondo di Don Camillo of village band clubs, in between chasing law reporters to write about his court cases, but only if they use his name.