Are they going to quit embarrassing themselves?

Joseph Muscat convenes a meeting of some of his more scintillating candidates and spokespersons.

This is my column in The Malta Independent, today.

To heap further embarrassment and humiliation on the ridiculous Leo Brincat, George Vella and Luciano Busuttil, the Attorney-General declared yesterday that Malta’s accession to Partnership for Peace did not require ratification by parliament.

You would imagine that somebody who has served as Malta’s foreign minister, as Vella did, and who aspires to serve in that capacity again, would have known this.

But no, that’s too much to ask.

If this is what Labour can cream off the surface of its excellent supply of ministerial material, just picture what the scrapings of the barrel-bottom are like.

Speaking of which, we can’t very well have expected Leo Brincat to know what requires ratification by parliament and what does not.

The man served both Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici most loyally, and anybody who is not ashamed of having done, particularly, the latter is not worth bothering with.

I don’t think anybody, particularly not the man in their dock, needs lectures on how to do things properly, delivered by one of Doctor Zero’s glove-puppets.

I don’t remember Leo Brincat resigning the day his cabinet boss headed a convoy of drydocks lorries into Valletta as they smashed things up en route, excusing their behaviour by calling them the aristocracy of the workers. Enough said.

Leo should give himself a good grilling, helpfully dousing himself in olive oil first, then tossing himself on Sogno Busuttil’s barbecue set, the one he told us about on Facebook.

As for Luciano ‘Sogno’ Busuttil himself, the man is not just an embarrassment to his party. He is, above all, an embarrassment to himself.

I saw him walk into court the other day as I listened to the judgement being read out in which I was found not guilty of libelling that creature Charlon Gouder of the Labour Party’s propaganda machine, Super One TV. He wore the open-mouthed, blank-eyed expression that one tends to associate with the intelligence quotient of a root vegetable.

And yet he throws his weight about like nobody’s business. There’s little worse or more dangerous, in my book, than a person who’s too thick to know just how thick he is.

If this is the poor stuff by which Labour plans to govern, a dream machine it most certainly is not. Joseph Muscat must be truly desperate to shove clunking losers like Luciano to the fore, instead of hiding them away where they can do the minimum of damage.

But what am I saying?

The man doesn’t even know that he should be hiding George Vella and Leo Brincat because too many of us remember them in their earlier incarnations of power, and because they’re unlikely to appeal, what with their pension pass, to people who are too young to remember Leo squawking at Prime Minister KMB’s side, or George Vella shouting ‘Unjoni Ewropeja qatt!” at Prime Minister Sant’s elbow.

The Attorney General correctly pointed out that had accession to Partnership for Peace (in 1995) required ratification by parliament, then it followed that withdrawal from Partnership for Peace (in 1996) would also have needed that ratification.

Yet, as we know – the Attorney General did not say this because he cannot make political statements – Alfred Sant and the very same George Vella withdrew Malta from Partnership for Peace as their very first act of government after winning the 1996 election, and they never brought parliament into it.

They were correct not to do so, because if joining PfP did not need parliamentary ratification, then nor withdrawal from PfP. And this makes nonsense of the Labour Party’s current protestations that the Nationalist government “went behind parliament’s back”.

I found it most excruciatingly painful to see that our past and future foreign minister, George Vella, is so very inept – after all, he is little more than a general practitioner who spends his days checking sore throats and dicky elbows – that he actually asked whether the Security Agreement which forms part of the PfP membership documents should have been ratified by parliament.

Shouldn’t he know the answer to this one?

Or is a thorough knowledge of antibiotics sufficient qualification for the post of foreign minister?

No, the Attorney General replied, the Security Agreement did not require ratification because it is not an agreement between states. One despairs. If Vella doesn’t know this, who in the Labour Party does?

Not content with the Attorney-General’s replies, Vella sought to enter into an argument or debate with him during Tuesday’s sitting of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee. Had the Attorney-General been a quite different man and not the holder of a constitutional role which must be served with dignity, he might well have replied:

“Sir, I will not presume to question your knowledge of sutures and enemas. So please do not presume to second-guess my knowledge of the law.”

But the prize for Turnip Question of the Week must certainly go to Luciano Busuttil who, with that primitive lawyer’s habit of seeking to make a question serve the purpose of a statement, asked the Attorney-General to confirm that NATO is in fact formed of sovereign states.

I must be missing something here: why would Busuttil need the Attorney-General to confirm that for him if he never learned it at school?

He can just Google it on his amazing smartphone, instead of using that smartphone for Facebook updates on his petrol consumption and how he cleaned his barbecue set in preparation for summer, conjuring up for me a nighmarish Maltese hell of frozen burgers and pink sausages in some humid, horrid yard, accompanied by yellow wine in plastic cups.

The Attorney-General had to explain to him, patiently, that even though NATO is made up of sovereign states, it remains an organisation, and the status of an organisation supersedes that of its individual members.

He spelled it out in simple language for the benefit of Busuttil, probably while quietly wondering what sort of quality the law course is nowadays if Busuttil was allowed out the other end without knowing this.

An organisation, he told Busuttil the lawyer, has a different personality at law to the individual states which are its members, “in the same way that there is a difference between a company and its individual shareholders”. The treaty is between Malta and NATO, not between Malta and the individual states which form NATO.

Had I been Luciano Busuttil, I would have died of shame. But what did I say earlier? The man is so thick that he doesn’t even know it.

Watch out for him in Joseph Muscat’s cabinet of curiosities.