It’s not about elitism or a superiority complex, Prime Minister

Jason Azzopardi asked the prime minister in parliament this evening whether he thinks Phyllis Muscat equal in ability and competence to career diplomat and former ambassador Salv Stellini, who headed the CHOGM Organisation Committee in 2005.

Joseph Muscat snapped back with a bitchy remark about “superiority complexes” and “elitism”.

“I can’t stand the way you think people need tobe close to the PN or part of the elite to be good at a job. I stand by my choice of Phyllis Muscat,” he said.

What is he doing there – calling his friend Phyllis a hamalla Laburista who he thinks can do the job anyway? That’s not very polite.

His remarks are wrong-headed in several ways.

1. This is not about elitism or superiority complexes, but about fitness for purpose. Mrs Muscat isn’t fit for purpose.

2. ‘Elite’ can be social elite or professional elite. Mrs Muscat is neither. Ideally, in this particular job you would be both, because either one alone is not enough. Being neither of the two is a recipe for trouble.

3. Competent people – or what Muscat in his Socialist International Mario Vella language calls ‘the elite’ – tend to gravitate towards the Nationalist Party and feel more comfortable with it because Labour’s crass incompetence and cutting corners scares them off. There was a moment back there when they were prepared to give Labour the benefit of the doubt and even voted for Muscat, but the past two years, and especially the last year, have been especially worrying.

4. Appointing somebody like Phyllis Muscat to do a job that she is unfit to do, and saying she is no different to the person who did it before, is your typical Soviet way of downgrading the skills and abilities of ‘the elite’ – but more pertinently, it is a way of saying, in the true Soviet fashion, that grace, style, manners, sensitivity to situations, knowledge of protocol and even the ability to handle cutlery don’t matter. Meanwhile, anyone who points out that the ability to converse with heads of state and heads of government, and their aides, is important is immediately labelled an elitist with a superiority complex. We can have Phyllis Muscat chewing with her mouth open and talking about rubbish.

5. The main reason that the prime minister should not have appointed Phyllis Muscat to this job is that she is one of his closest friends and confidantes, travelling with him on family holidays and entertaining him, his wife and their children to weekends on her boat. This makes the appointment cronyism if not outright corruption. This, and not Phyllis Muscat’s rough manners, lack of grace and conversation, and total incompetence is what the Opposition should concentrate on. Prime ministers in democracies do not appoint their closest friends to jobs and positions. It is totally unacceptable. Unless the Nationalist Party plans to do the same when in government, it should lay into this.