Astrid Vella: a strategist who can’t see that she’s losing the war because she’s winning some battles

The ability to see the bigger picture and to foresee consequences is one of the hallmarks of intelligence. The only circumstances in which that ability is thwarted and obfuscated in intelligent people are in the context of personal relationships – love, friendship, family and so on. Your need to believe in the individual overcomes your instinct and common sense.

But in politics, that does not apply at all. Environmental campaigning and lobbying are part of politics; politics is not only party politics.

When Astrid Vella pulled out her megaphone a little while before the 2008 general election and began marching and demonstrating and campaigning and lobbying and rallying the Tigne Beach and Union Club types (a cipher for a particular demographic, lest they all get uppity) who live in a world of their own, I wrote regularly about how stupid and shortsighted she is, and that if she was not stupid and shortsighted, then she was deliberately and maliciously working for Alfred Sant’s and Joseph Muscat’s interests.

She denied the latter, despite embracing Muscat and kissing him outside parliament after the St John’s Cathedral vote in 2010, so I was forced to conclude that she is the former: stupid and shortsighted.

The inevitable result of what she was doing was glaringly obvious to me: a bigger surge in the vote for Labour, followed by a Labour government and absolutely disastrous environmental policies. Mrs Vella cannot possibly be so thick that she couldn’t see how her efforts would inevitably help lead to a Labour government. I don’t think that is possible.

I think what she couldn’t see is that Joseph Muscat was lying about his concern for the environment, and that he cynically used her as a stalking-horse for Sandro Chetcuti and the Malta Developers Association, while stroking her ego so that she remained blissfully unaware of it. Maybe she can see it now, with hindsight. And maybe that is also why she is no longer marching and demonstrating with her megaphone, because she feels foolish.

What Muscat did is this. In public, he pretended to champion Astrid Vella and listen to the concerns of her Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar (FAA) and those of the constantly complaining Sliema residents. But behind the scenes, he collaborated with Sandro Chetcuti – who unlike Astrid Vella had a desk and an office on the fourth floor at the Labour Party HQ – and the developers’ lobby, who were in on the game and who knew that Astrid Vella was being stroked for the votes that would put them in power.

Then, as soon as Muscat became prime minister, Sandro Chetcuti and the developers’ lobby took over and the environmentalists were kicked aside. Astrid Vella was decorated in the incoming Labour government’s first Republic Day honours list in 2013, then written off while plans for a massive tower on her doorstep and slap-bang in the middle of FAA Central in Qui-Si-Sana were announced – a real ‘hekk, hu go fik’ move.

But when Muscat strode (waddled, actually) up the stairs into the Auberge de Castille for the first time in March 2013, watched by a howling crowd of jubilant supporters, it was Sandro Chetcuti who walked in with him, and not Astrid Vella or any other real or pseudo environmentalist.

For all those years, I tried in vain to explain to Astrid Vella and her supporters that they should conduct themselves differently if their real interest is the environment. I could see very clearly that by their behaviour they were going to give us a far worse result and not a better one: an environmentally destructive Labour government rather than a Nationalist government with reformed environmental policies. But they took up the Labour chant and dismissed my motivation as the partisan talk of a ‘blogger Nazzjonalista’.

Right now, I wish I could have the lot of them lined up and shot at dawn for malicious stupidity. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

It’s too late, Astrid. You should have seen it coming. If you were a military strategist, you’d be the sort who couldn’t see that he was losing the war because he was winning a few battles. Joseph Muscat is the proper sort: the sort who knows that it doesn’t matter if you lose a few battles, that your efforts should indeed not be expended on winning them unless they are crucial, as long as you win the war. Whether the war is a moral or immoral one is irrelevant, because the same strategic thinking always applies.

Environmental policy in Malta emerges only from government policy, so it follows that environmental campaigners have only two options open to them if they want to change things. The first is to lobby the government to change or amend its policies, and if that fails or looks hopeless, to cooperate with the Opposition on forming its environmental policies and to work in such a way that it does not undermine its own environmental objectives by undermining the chances of the Opposition becoming the government. I really don’t know why these things should have to be spelled out. I don’t think they have to be spelled out to Astrid Vella. I think that this is exactly how she was operating between 2008 and 2013, but that she made the fatal error of failing to assess both the government and the Opposition of the time correctly. She believed that Joseph Muscat was the environmental saviour and that the Nationalist Party was a destroyer of the environment, and acted accordingly.