National alert: Joseph Muscat has started using the term “political elites”

The Prime Minister (ours in Malta) has begun already to use the disparaging term “political elites”, and this in the context of his political rivals, to signify that he is not among those “political elites”.

Those of us who are sane and steady will immediately understand how cynical and cracked this is. He is, after all, the prime minister and you can’t get more “political elite” than that. Busuttil, as the Opposition leader, is not among the “political elite” because he is not in government and is clearly doing a pretty good job at finding out what people are upset about because Elite Joseph, who isn’t listening at all, has seen his 36,000-vote majority whittled away to almost nothing in just three years.

Deliberately and cynically, Muscat also accuses Busuttil of being part of the establishment – a word that means nothing to Maltese people divorced from British idiom, which is why he will now turn increasingly to the more easily understood “elites”. Muscat is hyper-establishment and hardly the 21st-century Che Guevara of a small rock suspended somewhere between Tunis and Tripoli. He is staid, boring, middle-aged, looks much older than he is, has a wife and two children, leads an ultra-conservative life in an ultra-traditional house, pursues traditional entertainment habits like going out to the same old restaurants for the same old Sunday lunch with friends, spends summer Sundays on his friend Phyllis’s boat plying the well-worn route between Mellieha and Comino, has a conservative attitude towards accumulating wealth but not spending it, and is the Prime Minister, which latter is the most ‘establishment’ you can get.

Simon Busuttil looks positively hip compared to that.

But let’s get back to the way he has begun flinging the words “political elites” around, to align himself with the Europeans now agitating against Europe (back to his true roots after a few short years in disguise).

What would you call a cabinet minister who has come into politics out of nowhere aged 35, gets given the health and energy ministries by his best friend the prime minister, proceeds to set up secret offshore operations for the laundering of money, which are discovered only by chance, and then gets ‘disciplined’ with a promotion to the prime minister’s desk-drawer, where he can carry on doing as he pleases, with all the plundering that entails?

That’s right: political elite.

The political elite

The Establishment