Elvis has left the building

Jesus saves! The revolution is here.

Seven years ago, Joseph Muscat sashayed about town tacked to Alfred Sant’s coat-tails and claimed that partnership had won the referendum. Five years on, interviewed as Sant’s successor, he conceded “with hindsight” that the Yes vote “might” have won the referendum.

That’s why I’m not surprised to hear him claim now that his party won Thursday’s vote. When you reason through the seat of your pants, you’re always a winner in your own eyes, even if in the eyes of nobody else but the completely deluded.

Sant and Muscat believed they won the referendum because they counted the ballot sheets of the dead and of those who didn’t vote at all.

They sent people out on the streets to celebrate and get drunk. We won! We won! Partnership won the referendum! Now Sant is in a political cupboard and Muscat is out on his own, winding up His Master’s Voice and repeating the fiction that he won the vote against the power station.

Won the vote? The man wasn’t even there when parliament voted. Elvis had left the building, along with his men and Justyne Caruana, who now tells us that Tonio Borg framed her. I hope he used something nice and tasteful, with plenty of curlicues and gilding.

The imaginative coconuts in Labour’s communications HQ are probably working even as we speak on the brilliantly fresh idea of a series of advertisements in the English-language newspapers: I Believe Justyne Caruana Is Innocent.

Muscat’s conviction that he is the golden hero in one of Malta’s darkest political periods – as the intellectually-challenged secretary-general of Forum Zghazagh Laburisti put it – prevents him from seeing the situation for what it really is: a comedy in many acts. After that high drama protracted over weeks, the bottom line is this: the Opposition’s motion was soundly defeated.

All the votes were against it and not even one was in favour. The Opposition, having gone to all that trouble to put a motion against the power station before the house, then didn’t bother to stay in the house to vote. ‘Hey, where are you going? Isn’t this your issue?’ ‘Sorry, we’re sulking and stamping our feet.’

There’s another point which Joseph ‘Partnership Won the Referendum’ Muscat conveniently overlooks in this most recent attempt at distracting us from his absolute inability to deliver a single policy option. He can’t claim to have won the vote because he doesn’t know how those MPs who had not yet voted, when the Speaker halted proceedings, would have voted if they were permitted to carry on.

Can he read their minds? Of course, he is free to make a rational guess as to whether they would have said Yes or No, or No/Yes/No, but that’s all it is: a guess. He can’t claim to have won based on the way he thinks MPs probably would have voted had they voted at all, which they didn’t until after he’d left.

Joseph Muscat knows that Mario Galea made a genuine mistake. He’s not contesting that. What he is contesting is whether Galea should have been given the chance to correct that mistake.

But really, what sort of charlatan do you have to be, to insist on being allowed to use somebody’s befuddlement, rather than their consent, to claim victory? “I won because Mario Galea got a little confused.” Try impressing anyone with that. It won’t pick up many chicks at the bar tonight.

Exactly what is Joseph Muscat trying to do? That he has been promoted way beyond his abilities has been obvious from the outset – not to everyone, it’s true, but certainly to those who had closely observed his trajectory from Super One hack to MEP to Opposition leader in six brief years. He has not moved on from the Super One hack mindset.

He thinks like Charlon Gouder. Indeed, he was Charlon Gouder six years ago, and we would never imagine that we could one day end up with Charlon Gouder as Opposition leader. But there you go. We did end up with Joseph Muscat, who thinks and behaves like a Super One reporter and is clearly unable to move beyond that.

Muscat doesn’t know where to go from here. He has three long years ahead of him and he is at an absolute loss as to how to fill them. His speeches are shallow, meaningless and cribbed from those of major statesmen. He doesn’t feel the words. He has no policies and can propose no alternatives when he objects to the proposals of others.

He has moved from one engineered drama to another and appears not to have worked out that he has tried people’s patience just that bit too far.

But above all else, he fails to understand that however desperate he might be, he should never let it show. His desperation is oozing out of every pore. First he led his followers to believe that he would bring the government down on a money vote a couple of months ago, and had them mass outside parliament to hear the crash.

Now he has spent the last few weeks building the vote on the power station to crisis point, trying to get government MPs to back him up on the basis that it is not a money vote and won’t bring down the government.

When he saw that it wasn’t going to happen, he latched onto Mario Galea’s confusion and created chaos in parliament. It’s been years, probably decades, since I have heard such shouting and howling of vulgar obscenities on the Labour benches. They sounded no different to a mob on the streets of Athens, about to firebomb a bank.

Joseph Muscat is false, shallow and hollow. A few days ago I wrote that the last time I heard him speak with conviction was when he told us that the EU would spell the end of this country and that we should vote against membership. But on Thursday night, he showed the first signs of emotion and conviction that I have seen him demonstrate publicly in years.

When he spoke to the Super One camera after his ‘Elvis has left the building’ stunt, his voice cracked and his eyes filled with tears. Was this the distress of a Great Leader at the thought of toxic waste being funnelled straight into our children’s lungs, ruining ‘all our tomorrows’? No, it was the distress of a spoiled only child who hadn’t got his own way for once and just couldn’t take it. He was crying out of sheer frustration.

He’s not a man, but a spoiled mummy’s boy. Lawrence Gonzi must be the unluckiest prime minister in Maltese history, beleaguered by problems and crises coming out of left field and crippled by the internal back-stabbing of some of the really ghastly and self-obsessed people foisted on him by the electorate.

Yet you will never catch him sobbing into a NET TV camera. When you need to gauge a man’s true worth, put him under pressure. Joseph Muscat has fallen at the first hurdle, just as his predecessor Sant did, when he was reduced to screaming hysterically in public over a yacht marina vote.

If Muscat can’t even manage the job of leader of the Opposition, how in heaven’s name is he going to manage that of prime minister? It’s not as though he has a couple of Great Brains to prop him up, because they are even sillier than he is.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.