GUEST POST/Statesmanship is not salesmanship

By H. P. Baxxter

So that was it then: CHOGM. The Great White Hope. The Bretton Woods that never was, out of which a New World Order was to spring.

At worm’s eye level, which means you and me, all we saw was pageantry, officialdom, paranoid and ostentatious security measures, a great deal of posturing, some highly questionable wardrobe decisions, and extravagance. Much extravagance.

It was a meeting of white leaders and some brown and black ones, meant to change the fate of the planet. And it was celebrated with camp choreographed mummeryfeaturing dancers pretending to be British sailors – if British sailors wore catsuits. Because that is what the Commonwealth’s British heritage is all about: sailors in a music hall, sailors in a whorehouse, and sailors down The Gut.

Many hundreds of thousands of euros were spent on – cringe – “embellishment”. Hundreds of thousands more were spent on light-shows, sexy-legged hostesses, lavish banquets, tents that were never used, and Sunita Mukhi’s Swarovski-crystal-encrusted confections.

We hope, at least, that Michelle Muscat, Spouse of the Prime Minister, paid for her own white fur cape and sundry knock-offs from Eva Peron’s 1950s wardrobe.

The whole thing, together with the equally extravagant EU-Africa migration summit, cost the Maltese taxpayer a staggering 10.5 million euros. And that was just the official budget. We have no way of knowing how much was siphoned off from other budgets in the way of direct orders in the spirit of “with a little help from our friends”.

It was all so unnecessary. And so out of place.

The video of the 1989 Bush-Gorbachev summit should be required viewing. There is no comparison. There is a reassuring sobriety to the scenes filmed outside the Auberge de Castille. Compare this with the blinding LED lighting (never actually used) and the slick logos of the so-called Valletta Summit and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Those of you who are reading this piece hoping I’ll pin the blame entirely on Joseph Muscat will be disappointed. Sure, he is now in charge and he wanted all this. In the manner of Maltese prime ministers, he is not just in charge of policy and events, but of the national idiom. So by all means, let’s point fingers. But he wasn’t the one that started it. He just took it, ran with it, and supersized it.

I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the transformation of Malta from republic to Malta plc. Some time in the early 2000s, a paradigm shift occurred. The new Maltese dream would be money. And glitz. Malta became a shop window. Summits turned into expos. Ministers turned into salesmen. Everything was a song festival. Winning the Eurovision Song Contest became a creditable national goal. And the government turned into a marketing firm.

Eddie Fenech Adami was perhaps the last prime minister with a sense of the real purpose of politics, a man with gravitas. The two prime ministers who followed him took office in the new Malta. The country was now a member state of the European Union, and our way of life would henceforth be funded by a flood of EU money and the sale of a lot of intangible assets: cheap labour, cheap taxes, financial deniability, looking the other way, and in end, citizenship itself.

This is not me lumping together two very different prime ministers. I am just pointing out the continuity. Giving the context.

The Maltese were not at all shocked by the lavish display of profligate showmanship during CHOGM. Many of them were in awe, and there was cross-party praise.

Therein lies the key. For the past few months, I’ve been hearing a lot of references to the raison d’être of politics from Simon Busuttil. His strongest qualities, often derided as ‘lack of charisma’, are in fact statesmanship and sobriety. We need a good dose of both, fast, because republics are not flashy bordellos. Nor are they expos.

When all is said and done, what is the message behind the glitz? What is the attractiveness of Malta? That it can conjure up light shows and choreographed spectacles? That some of its people can sing while wearing outfits thrown out by Priscilla, Queen of the Desert?

Big deal.

That it can impose curfews at will? Order the university and schools to shut down for the day to keep traffic off the roads?That is what autocrats do. They do it in Beijing, when the parades are out for national day.

But none of that is what business seeks. Business seeks sober inventiveness. It seeks beautiful creativity and cleverness. Thoughtfulness. In short, it wants sobriety.

Besides which, all this glitz shows us up as Godawful hamalli.

Is this what we joined the EU for?

It turns the rest of us into have-nots. The majority of citizens will never be able to live the kind of luxury existence of the Muscats and the CHOGM delegates. We shall not go to the ball, my dears, in a white fur cape and Sunita Mukhi minaudiere emblazoned with an eight-pointed cross made of crystals.

And this, mind, was supposed to be about us, the millions of aspirational – and sometimes downright poor – citizens of the Commonwealth. Republic means common good. It is derived from the Latin for “the things/goods of the people”: res publica. But the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2015, as organised by Phyllis Muscat, Kurt Farrugia and Joseph Muscat for Malta, did not serve the common good. It served the business interests and the political marketing needs of the very few, including the organisers themselves.