I’ll believe it when I see it

Not to be trusted – not at all, not even for a split second. He spends all his time with Laburisti, spent his honeymoon with Consuelo and Jose Herrera, and clearly has a plan.

This is my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, today.

Sections of the press are making a big deal of what they see as Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s backing of the bills on cohabitation (not yet published – we only have a rather old white paper to go on) and IVF.

The Times ran a headline yesterday: ‘Pullicino Orlando “backs” cohabitation and IVF bills’.

Indeed. I wouldn’t rush to judgement on that.

It’s not as though we haven’t seen some very spectacular illustrations of what sort of man we are dealing with here, and how you can’t trust him as far as you can throw him which, admittedly given his petit physique, is further than a couple of feet.

Now that he is an independent MP and has no political party to which he can be disloyal, his scope for blackguard behaviour is somewhat restricted.

You can’t be disloyal unless you have something to which you can be disloyal. So instead of doing his usual and ringing Malta Today after his meeting to discuss the bills with Minister Chris Said, Pullicino Orlando released a formal statement to the media.

He also said that Said agreed that he should do this – as though Said had a choice.

Protocol, procedure and basic good manners dictate that it is the more senior person (in this case, the cabinet minister) who releases the statement after a meeting, if any statement is to be released.

By releasing that statement himself, Pullicino Orlando revealed that not only is he unchanged in his methods and thinking, but that he continues to play power games and that this is his primary interest.

I am surprised that so many people cannot see what is staring them in the face. By becoming an independent MP, the man who has been in a rage for years because he wasn’t made a cabinet minister and because he can’t admit that he ruined his own political career has now created for himself a position in which he is more powerful than any minister in the cabinet.

“Do you like this, Jeffrey?”

“Hmmm, give me time and I’ll think about it and let you know. No, I want you to change this, that and the other, or I’ll scream and cry and stamp my size 38 feet.”

Yes, it is negative power and not positive, but at this stage in his political life, he won’t be looking any gift horses in the mouth.

Pullicino Orlando also knows that by regularly consulting him on bills and the rest, the government will continue to lose respect with the electorate, even though it cannot do otherwise save call an election and tell him what we all want to tell him: two words that begin with F and O, followed by “into oblivion”.

Anybody who trusts Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando does so at his or her peril.

There are many people who can say this from the perspective of their personal experience, and I am one of them. But for anybody to trust him still, at this late stage and after so much very public evidence that he is a complete knave, is reckless.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando backs cohabitation and IVF bills? I wouldn’t place money on that, even if I were a gambling girl.

It’s not as though we shouldn’t have learned the timeworn pattern of his behaviour by now. He starts off with a plan, leads you up the garden path, and then assaults you in the bushes.

And for the benefit of my Labour-voting readers, that’s a metaphor and not a literal description of something Jeffrey likes to do in his Haz-Zebbug garden.

So expect some attention-seeking stunt with these bills, but only after Pullicino Orlando has drawn as much blood as possible. The big, loud clue-with-bells-on to what lies ahead is in these sentences in The Times’s report:

And although Dr Pullicino Orlando’s press statement was positive in tone, the MP stopped short from pledging to support the Bill in Parliament.

Dr Pullicino added: “I obviously reserve the right to present amendments to both Bills, when the government presents them in their final version, at the opportune moment if I feel that it may be necessary”.

We can expect that when debate on these two bills begins, Pullicino Orlando will hijack it with his demands. He will ensure that there is at least one demand in respect of each bill to which the government cannot or will not accede.

He will not particularly care about these demands; the most important thing is that they are something he can use to cause further pain to his sworn enemies in the government.

I might, of course, be terribly wrong about him once more and we shall all discover that he is now a reformed man and, beyond that, a gentleman.

But as I said, I’m not betting anything on that. I’ll be happy to see it happen, but not at all surprised if it doesn’t.