Tonight at Labour HQ: a contest between two cheats

Published: June 9, 2016 at 9:18am

The race is on tonight for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, and this time round it stands to be a little more thrilling than the Energy Minister’s one-horse race as the party leader’s anointed one back in February.

Of course, we have since discovered exactly why it was a one-horse race and why Mizzi was Muscat’s anointed one, and this is exactly why another election is taking place now.

From what we have heard so far, not that casual surveys of party delegates’ opinion are particularly reliable, it looks to be a neck-and-neck contest between the Minister for the Economy and the Justice Minister, with the chairman of the Grand Harbour Regeneration Corporation merely serving as an also-ran.

Yes, Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi might in the end prove to be the tortoise which outruns those two sleazy hares, but not if the two sleazy hares have anything to do with it. They’ve been busy pushing and shoving their way into the limelight over the last two months as other members of the government have taken great care to slide into the background so as not to be pressed on the matter of government corruption. Cardona and Bonnici have no problems with those sorts of questions. They simply avoid them, give a non-answer, or denigrate their critics.

But that’s not really what I planned to write about here. The subject of this post is that standards have fallen so low in the Labour Party (not that they were ever particularly high) that out of the three contestants for the party’s deputy leadership, two are men who notoriously cheated on their wives, one of them on two wives. Yes, this is the best that the Labour Party can do even in these troubled times, when now more than ever it needs some aura of respectability about it.

To make matters worse, both Chris Cardona and Owen Bonnici cheated on their wives while they sat in cabinet as senior government ministers. Both of them were thrown out of the family home while in office, and both are living in temporary accommodation: the Justice Minister in a couple of mezzanine rooms in Valletta which he took originally as a sort of office, and the Economy Minister sofa-surfing in luxury between one flat borrowed from a drinking buddy or associate and another. And if challenged about this in parliament, he’ll produce a post-facto lease agreement saying that he’s paying almost a year’s rent only when he leaves the flat.

An important distinction has to be made between men who start a relationship with another woman after their marriage ends, which is perfectly fine and acceptable, and men who cheat on their wife while they are still living with her, pretending that everything is just dandy, and accusing her of being suspicious and crazy if she realises that something is going on and challenges him about it.

Those men are liars and cheats, and if they will lie and cheat to their wife, or to any woman with whom they live and who has borne them children, to whom they owe a moral debt of care, they will cheat and lie in any other of life’s situations, and even at work.

Yes, there are rare exceptions, but quite frankly, I speak as a woman of a certain age when I say that I don’t think Cardona and Bonnici are among them. It’s not a coincidence, not to my mind, that they are the two very ones who have rushed to the fore to stand at the Prime Minister’s side and help him PR government corruption and the canyon of sleaze in which he, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are mired. It fits right in with the rest of their behaviour.

Relationships fail and marriages fall to pieces and there is little that can be done about it when that stage is reached, but the man who hangs about and starts a new relationship before his marriage is formally ended, even while pretending that there is nothing wrong, and while his wife is going about her duties with home, children and work, has a problematic character and cannot be trusted.

Some people – and yes, surprisingly there are women among them – like to think of a man’s cheating on his wife, on the mother of his children (he may not be married to her) in a separate category, as though it has no bearing on the rest of his character and personality. They include the women who take up with men who cheated on their wife, and who are then shocked, several years down the line, to find that this man with whom they cheated has done the same to them.

Their shock comes from the fact that they did not see their man’s cheating on his wife as a character flaw in the man, but as a flaw or shortcoming in the wife. Famous last words: “It was her fault. She made him do it. They were incompatible. She was such a bitch to him. She really neglected him. He won’t do it to me, because I’m different.” Sorry, darling, but the odds are that he will.

Men who see another man’s cheating in his marriage as something ‘private’ and ‘personal’, rather than as a poor reflection on that man’s character, are also taken aback when they discover, having gone into business with him or taken him up as a friend, that he has proved to be not quite reliable and, good heavens, even stabbed them in the back over a deal. Or maybe he has gone and whispered information he shouldn’t have. Why on earth are they surprised? Do they honestly imagine that he owes them a greater debt of loyalty than he does to the woman for whom he took vows before God or a representative of the state?

Those rare exceptions aside, men who cheat on the mothers of their children are people who will always let you down in the end, who are unreliable and who – this is the worst trait of all, and the root cause of all the other problems – think only of themselves, see things only in terms of what suits them, and justify their choices and decisions, however bad, in terms of it being the only way (because it suits them).

These are not the sort of men who should be leaders. They are not the sort of men who should be given responsibility for anything. They are, quite frankly, unfit. It is tragic that this is what standards in public life in Malta have come to: a couple of marriage cheats, thrown out by their wives when they were government ministers already, one of them cheating on his second wife after having already cheated on his first, seen as real contenders for the deputy leadership of the party in government.

It is bad enough that they are government ministers, with such important portfolios. They are a bad example to everyone else: that you can publicly cheat on your wife, create hell for your young children, get thrown out of the family home for fornicating with girlfriends, and still be ‘respected’ and command high public office, because what you have done is of no matter or consequence.

We’re supposed to have come a long way from the 1960s, but apparently, we have not. We have regressed dramatically by almost half a century. They see it as progress, but to those of us who weren’t born in the 1990s it is fast forward to the past of my childhood, when the leaders of both the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party publicly cheated on their wives and humiliated them: a couple of bantam-sized macho Sicilians parading their potency about town while their wives were reduced to misery at home.

One of those wives left Malta and returned home to England, talking about filing for divorce, but then was persuaded to return to a sort of living hell. The other wife fought back against her husband’s humiliation of her by humiliating him in return, though in the end it just added to the mess and helped Mintoff gain power in 1971.

Do we want to see that again? No, we do not. We’re supposed to be civilised now, so give us some men we can respect because they respect their wives. Pause for a while now and add up the number of men in the cabinet of government, on the government benches in parliament, in senior Labour Party positions and appointed by this government to very senior state positions who ended up living apart from their wives because of their cheating. And this was supposed to be the most feminist government we ever had.

Joseph Muscat and Owen Bonnici

Joseph Muscat and Owen Bonnici

This photograph was taken at Hugo's Lounge when Chris Cardona was already Minister for the Economy

This photograph was taken at Hugo’s Lounge when Chris Cardona was already Minister for the Economy