Please bear with me

Franco Debono has the personality and democratic credentials of this man, and he doesn't have the insight to know it.

This was my column in The Malta Independent yesterday.

I’m sorry. I know that many of you are now turning the page and switching to a different channel when you see that man’s face or hear his name.

And that you switch even faster when you hear his voice.

But it’s going to have to be Franco Debono again, and roll on the day when we first hear the words “Franco Tabone? Remind me again – who was he exactly?”

He has a peculiar view of democracy. Lawrence Gonzi is an oligarch, because he won’t do as one backbencher from the fifth district, who has assumed for himself the role of prime minister, decides.

Gonzi was elected by the people to form a government and to govern for five years. Debono pulled in the votes of a couple of thousand people from one district and decided he was the prime minister. The basis for this decision was that his classmate, who scored lower marks at school, is the Leader of the Opposition.

Now this one backbencher is holding the legitimate government to ransom until they do what he wants, and he says that he’s doing so in the name of democracy.

Instead of laughing loudly in his face and blowing the raspberries the press anywhere else would have blown, reporters gather at his feet where he wants them and proceed to paint a false picture for their readers.

There Debono goes, behaving like a totalitarian dictator and with the temperament of one, calling everyone else an oligarch and a Great Leader, and instead of mocking him to hell and back for his overweening pride, reporters join him in his game of poker.

I really can’t understand how he gets to sleep at night. That brass neck must be really quite stiff on his pillow.

So the Nationalist Party’s parliamentary group met yesterday afternoon to discuss the various options. They appear to have achieved consensus on one matter at least: that this thoroughly unpleasant individual should not be allowed to blackmail the government. Well, about time too.

It’s bad enough that the prime minister, behaving as though he is not the leader of a free and democratic state, an EU member state, called for an end to ‘personal attacks’ on this awful man, compromising his own integrity and commitment to freedom of speech to mollify the terrorist standing in the crowded mall with his finger on the trigger.

A ‘personal attack’ is when those who wish to silence you come to your house in the dead of night and set it on fire. A ‘personal attack’ is when your political enemies slander your children anonymously in an attempt at silencing your criticism of them, because they know that slandering you won’t work.

A ‘personal attack’ is when you come out of a meeting in Marsa to find that all four of your car-tyres have been slashed. A ‘personal attack’ is when you receive real threats through the post and via the telephone and end up with a police guard at your gate. Those are ‘personal attacks’, Mr Prime Minister, and you know it.

Criticising a politician, his behaviour, his character, motivation, track record and personality are not ‘personal attacks’. Any politician who can’t take this should get the hell out of the kitchen. Anyone who seeks our praise and our vote should also expect our criticism – yes, even criticism of his hair, speech, food choices, house, car and clothes.

The whining politicians who live here in Malta – most prominently Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, Robert Musumeci, Jesmond Mugliett, John Dalli and now Franco Debono – should thank their lucky stars they don’t operate in Britain, Italy or the United States. They would be torn to shreds for their behaviour and then put through the mill for whining about it.

Criticism, even personal criticism, of politicians is legitimate in a democracy. It is more than legitimate; it is essential. The thorough and minute scrutiny of those who ask for our vote (more so if they get it) is key to ensuring that people know what they’re getting, what they have landed themselves with, the sort of people who represent them and are acting in their name on the public pay-roll.

I’ll go one further and say that if Franco Debono had been subjected to this level of scrutiny when he presented himself for election on the Nationalist Party ticket, or any other party ticket for that matter, we would not be where we are today.

The duty to subject would-be politicians to a proper examination is first and foremost the party’s, before they are selected. Once they are selected, and more so after they are elected, that duty passes to the press.

If I were on the candidate selection board, for example, I would have immediately looked askance at a grown man who has a villa of his own in Marsaxlokk but who continues to live with his parents in his childhood home well into his 30s – not to look after them because they are ill and ageing, but because he cannot move on to the next and most obvious chapter in his life.

Unfortunately, we now have a situation where quite large sections of the press are treating Debono, for reasons of their own that might have to do with a political agenda, as entirely a normal person making quite legitimate demands.

There are journalists working full-time on the Debono story who don’t go beyond reporting what he says, again and again and again, and who don’t make the slightest attempt at putting the man himself into context.

Because he does not carry a stick to wave about, or wear jack-boots, or grease his long and dirty hair and talk in a riddle-mixture of Italian, Maltese and English, Debono is taken seriously. But what if Norman Lowell wore a good Italian suit, trimmed his hair neatly and took regular baths, and spoke in proper Maltese?

Would the press then take seriously his political arguments and his behaviour, and report his posturing and his anti-democratic views as though they were legitimate and worthy of our proper consideration?

I am beginning to think that some reporters would.