GUEST POST/Joseph Muscat has become a burden for the country

Sent in by Dire Straits:

Like so many, I have watched what is happening with a mixture of horrified fascination, shame and anger. These people in government are just as awful, corrupt and incompetent as we thought they would be, and I am deeply upset that they are harming our country in so many nasty ways, day, after day, after day.

Joseph Muscat has failed his test, big time. If you take Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s version of events as correct (I can’t and don’t, but bear with me), then their ‘naivety’ has done so much damage to the Labour Party and Muscat’s government that the only right and proper thing for Muscat to do would have been to thank them for their service, and relieve them of it.

Of course that supposed naivety, for which the Prime Minister said at his press conference last Thursday that he “sort of rebuked” Mizzi, is something he must then also share. After all, he says he accepted without any qualms Mizzi’s miraculous “draft declaration of assets”, the one he supposedly received before Daphne Caruana Galizia outed Mizzi (and Schembri) as the owner of a company in Panama, which he set up after he became a minister.

But few fair-minded people buy that version of events. I certainly don’t. The Panama company and New Zealand trust look exactly like vehicles for hiding ill-gotten gains, and no-one has managed to give a remotely plausible alternative explanation for them. The Prime Minister’s stark refusal to do the obvious thing and remove both his chief of staff and his minister, in the face of a national wave of anger, suspicion and disgust, has fuelled the widely held belief that he is not just covering for his men, but that he’s in it with them.

Muscat does not have what it takes to be Prime Minister. He appears to have no moral compass at all. His standard of what is morally and politically acceptable is not just low, but is passed out on the floor in a drunken stupor. Beyond that, even those people who disliked him at least credited him with being a good tactician, and one who has a finger firmly on the national pulse. But it looks now as if Muscat has not gauged the public mood at all, and has also overestimated his ability to set the news agenda and to distract people so as to make them forget what they were talking about.

Muscat’s plan last week was clear: get all the bad news (his inability to sack Konrad Mizzi or Keith Schembri, and Manuel Mallia’s return to the cabinet) out of the way in one day on Thursday, followed by a mass meeting to rally the troops on Sunday, and then two years to throw money at the wider electorate and hope they forget. But I don’t think the majority of people are that stupid. We will see.

The Opposition leader has handled things well. He is right to constantly call on the country’s institutions to do their duty. That is what a statesman does. And despite being criticised for it, Simon Busuttil was right to call for a vote of no confidence in the entire government and not just Konrad Mizzi, even though it would have been politically more expedient to try and divide the government benches.

This is because the country’s problem is not just Konrad Mizzi. It is, primarily, Joseph Muscat. The Sunday Times leading article last Sunday was very clear on the matter. Busuttil is right to keep his sights fixed firmly on Muscat, and more and more people have come to understand this.

I’m confident that we, the people, will come together at the polls in 2018 to rid Malta of this debilitating problem, this burden of ineptitude, cronyism, profligacy and corruption. But I am very much afraid of all the additional damage that they can do to this country before that.

Keith Schembri (far right) and Joseph Muscat watch Konrad Mizzi being sworn in as Minister for Energy in March 2013: they had made plans already for offshore companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands at the time.