The grave consequences of a petty tragedy

This was my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando Smith) has spoken to Malta Today, as is his wont, to “warn” that if the Nationalist Party were to expel him, Franco Debono and Jesmond Mugliett, the government would immediately lose its majority, cease to be the government, and a general election have to be called.

Do we really need JPOS to “warn” us about this?

There are many who know little about our Constitution or the way parliamentary democracy works, but honestly, I had no idea things were so bad that Malta Today would end up building a story around the patently obvious.

It is incredible that even important journalists like the ones who work on that newspaper seem unable to understand that a member of parliament’s seat and his party ticket are two separate issues.

For the sake of clarity and the absence of further confusion, let’s go through the whole thing again, for the umpteenth time.

Members of parliament are elected on a party ticket (because it is impossible to be elected as an independent in practice), but the seat is effectively theirs. If the party expels them, or withdraws the whip – as happened with Wenzu Mintoff and Labour in the late 1980s, and as occasionally happens in the House of Commons – they continue to retain their seat.

They cannot be forced out by the party or their colleagues. Only the electorate can vote them out. The system, of course, like so many others, is built on the assumption that MPs who fall into disgrace, who are completely at odds with their party, or who have let their constituents down most terribly, will have the decency, dignity and honour to resign.

The inherent contradiction here is that the system expects honourable behaviour from dishonourable persons, something that is not going to happen.

Eelectors have no way of letting a disreputable member of parliament know whether they wish to vote him out before an election is called. But a sensible member of parliament would be able to gauge opinion among his constituents. He should at least try to do so.

In this case, Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando Smith) certainly knows what his constituents now think of him, because he has tried a few house visits, been to a few party clubs, and seen the surveys.

So yes, the party can expel a member of parliament, which effectively means the withdrawal of the whip, but it cannot dislodge that member of parliament from his seat.

Of course, whether it is ethical for the member of parliament to retain his seat, when his constituents effectively gave their number-one vote to the party and not to him personally (I am one of them, and there are another 5,000 or thereabouts) is another matter.

[Today’s note: Last night at our sixth-form college reunion, an old friend and I had our picture taken together, intending to caption it: “The only two people, among 5,000, who will admit publicly to the shame of voting for Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando”. We have met nobody else who will do so.]

Speaking as one of JPOS’s constituents now, rather than as a newspaper columnist, I believe he has done an absolutely terrible job of representing our interests, that he has concerned himself exclusively with representing his own personal needs and grudges, and that he doesn’t seem to care that it is the Nationalist Party we want in government, not him in his seat.

We would be better served by another member of parliament, who wouldn’t cause so much trouble while looking after No. 1 and not giving a damn about us. So he should have the decency to get out of the way, resigning his seat in time for his marriage in August and a fresh start in his life, leaving us alone and in peace because we have really had enough of him.

I am quite sure that he won’t be reading this article out in parliament, because it doesn’t suit him to do so.

Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando Smith), our MP, has done nothing at all for us. He certainly isn’t hard at work making sure the lives of Mosta residents have improved over the last few years. On the contrary, he has caused us a great deal of stress because by definition, his constituents don’t want a Labour government and he has been doing his utmost to give us one.

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Pullicino (Orlando Smith) told his cronies at Malta Today that he gathers the Nationalist Party is gearing up to expel him. Well, he knows that it would do that only if a general election is in the offing, so common sense should tell him that it will be the decision on a general election that comes first, and his expulsion will follow on from that, not the other way round.

If JPOS did not see himself as the centre of the universe, he would have been able to work this out: call an election, expel Jeffrey; and not, expel Jeffrey, call an election.

The man’s consummate lack of dignity never fails to enthral. Imagine knowing that those who elected you would gladly put you in the stocks and pelt you with putrid foodstuffs, that the party on whose ticket you stood can’t stand your guts because of your appalling conduct, yet still digging your heels in and sticking to that seat which you have only, and really only, because your constituents want Lawrence Gonzi to run the country, and not because you are Jeffrey Pullicino (Orlando Smith).

Would we have voted for this man if he had been an independent candidate? No. Would we have voted for him if he had been on the Labour, AD or (this is more likely) the Imperium Europa ticket? Most certainly not.

I really cannot understand why JPOS would regard the withdrawal of the party whip as such a great threat. By his own admission, he has no regard for the whip and believes that he is free to behave like an independent member of parliament, voting as he pleases even when there is no free vote, and ignoring the existence of the whip.

I just couldn’t believe it when I read, in his interview in The Sunday Times, that he didn’t tell the whip how he would vote, but if the whip had asked him, he “probably would have told him”.

All these years as a member of parliament in the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, and he thinks that it’s MPs who tell the whip how they will vote, and not the other way round.

Yes, he really is a most unsuitable representative of the people.

“A democratic party has no right whatsoever to censure an MP who is exercising his parliamentary duties in any way he deems fit,” he told Malta Today.

“If the same thing were to happen in another European country, all hell would break loose. Imagine what would happen if Prime Minister Cameron were to act in the same way with Conservative MPs, some of whom regularly vote with the Opposition on particular issues.”

Oh my, oh my.

JPOS needs to read something other than Facebook walls, my blog and interviews with himself. We are not concerned with “other European countries”, most of which are quite freshly out from behind the Iron Curtain or absolutely and utterly sordid and chaotic in their parliamentary operations, like Italy.

Our system is the Westminster model, so it is to the House of Commons that we must look. And yes, JPOS, members of parliament are threatened with the withdrawal of the whip on a fairly regular basis there, for all sorts of misdemeanours, even those that do not have anything to do with the way they vote in the House.

I shall give JPOS just one telling example.

David Cameron withdrew the whip from Conservative MP Derek Conway, effectively expelling him from the Conservative Party’s parliamentary group, and this because Conway had employed his son Freddie as a political researcher, using public funds he was allocated for the purpose.

If JPOS wishes to be held to the David Cameron standard, as he declares, then it stands to reason that the whip should have been withdrawn from him back in March or April 2008. It was not withdrawn for one reason only: we would have had to have another election immediately after the first.

He has taken advantage of this unhappy situation, and of the goodwill of his constituents, who to a man and woman now probably cannot stand his guts.

Yet instead of hanging his head in shame, he continues to cover himself in disgrace. There was a point back then when he could have said a few ‘mea maxima culpas’, got in line and redeemed himself with those who voted for him and even with his party.

Instead, he took the wrong road, egged on by those who surround him and whose bed he shares, and turned his life story into a petty tragedy, but one with grave consequences for us all, whether we know it or not.