Those who say that Mizzi has placed a burden of decision on the Prime Minister are making fools of themselves

I’m not the big expert on human nature. Even at the age of 51 and having been through so much, I still get some things and some people badly wrong. But I don’t think I was at all wrong in reading the situation – via video – when Konrad Mizzi spoke at the Labour Party’s annual general meeting/conference last Thursday night.

It couldn’t have been more screamingly obvious to me that the whole thing was a mise en scene, and that the ‘off the cuff’ speech had actually been written (he kept looking down at the podium to refer to it) in collaboration with Muscat himself and Muscat’s aides.

The way Muscat watched him carefully throughout was not the look of somebody guarded with trepidation at unknowns that might be blurted out. It was the look of somebody watching a performance by an actor or performer who he had coached in the days leading up to the show. And that’s exactly what the looks he exchanged with Louis Grech, the other deputy leader (in case you’ve forgotten) said: “Good, he didn’t go off-message.”

When Mizzi said that he would be leaving the decision on his resignation to the Prime Minister, he was NOT placing a burden on the Prime Minister, but saying exactly what the Prime Minister wanted him to say and told him to say. They planned this between them to buy more time. The Prime Minister does not need to be told, least of all by one of his own ministers, that the decision rests with him. He is the Prime Minister and can sack any minister. He doesn’t even need to give a reason. He sacked Godfrey Farrugia and gave the health portfolio to Mizzi in the run-up to the hospitals privatisation contracts without even bothering to give a reason why.

Labour politicians and media commentators now banging on about how Mizzi is wrong to burden the Prime Minister with this decision are simply making fools of themselves. Those two are seriously in league with each other.