The public persona of Joseph Muscat in this leadership campaign is a perfect echo of the public persona of Alfred Sant in the run-up to the 1996 election. It is this, and not just the fact that he is the anointed one, that makes him the Labour favourite. The flipside is that it is also precisely this that renders him so repugnant to floaters and to those who support the Nationalist Party. Labour, as we have had numerous other occasions to see, knows little about public affairs and political marketing, and is returning to the political market-place with a clone of its failed product.
But we know that already. The interesting thing is that you can read the Labour yes-men’s line of thought: if Sant scaled the summit in 1996, then Sant’s clone will do the same in 2013. Ho hum. That’s not very clever. Sant’s image worked in 1996 because the conditions were right, he promised to remove value added tax, and he was widely perceived to be a fresh phenomenon in the Labour Party, though he was anything but.
Oh, and he was propped up on one side by George Abela, who was widely admired by the people we like to call floaters, but who are really nothing more than individuals who like to hedge their bets. Some people I know have taken to calling themselves floaters, as though it conveys a sense of political independence rather than political immaturity and wishy-washiness. But anyway – all things are not similarly equal today and we have been through the Sant experience for rather too long and disliked it immensely. A Sant clone who pushes all the wrong memory buttons is going to be frowned upon now and not welcomed. That’s why Labour loves Joseph Muscat but almost everyone who didn’t vote Labour this time round or the time before that thinks he’s repellent.
George Abela had something sensible to say about this kind of thinking in a newspaper article a few days ago: “The party’s greatest foe is the unspoken reasoning that, having lost three elections, the next one must surely be owed to us; it’s the convoluted logic that the more we lose then the more we are sure to win. It is the logic of staying put which was followed in 2003 and which has kept us out (of government) to the present day. It is pointless to preach to the converted, yet the converted would do well to consider what it takes to win new converts. When all is said and done, what matters is the party’s ability to attract new support. For this, the keyword is credibility, especially since elections in Malta have become presidential, for better or worse.”
He’s right, of course. But sensible people don’t stand a chance of getting to the top in the Labour Party, which is increasingly beginning to put me in mind of some madly Orwellian novel written by Ben Elton (I’ve just read Blind Faith and loved it). For the past four decades, Labour has been about little other than creating an alternative reality to be inhabited by the chosen few, while the rest of us are obliged to go along with The Project. Now we can expect more of the same.
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Super One has carried on where it left off. There are lots of people with doctorates on the Labour benches, but until now, the only one whose doctorate has been made an integral part of his name is DoctorAlfredSant (one word). Everyone else is referred to as John Borg and Borg in the rest of the report, but DoctorAlfredSant has his five-syllable moniker repeated throughout the story. During Super One bulletins in the electoral campaign, I sometimes found myself resisting the urge to do the funky-chicken round the television set, squawking ‘DoctorElfridSantDoctorElfridSantDoctorElfridSant.’
And oh joy – now we have DoctorJosephMuscat (one word, and a whole syllable more than DoctorAlfredSant). The other four are Falzon, Bartolo, Coleiro Preca and Abela, but he is DoctorJosephMuscat, six times in the same news report. And so the cloning goes on. We are even being treated to the same obsessive focus on his “managerial style” and “managerial qualifications” – as though the first task of a prime minister is to be managerial, rather than inspirational.
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Is it my imagination, or are we all tired already of Joseph Muscat, when we should be excited by him? Imagine, then, how we’re going to feel about him five years from now, when he has exhausted the little bit of novelty value that he had. OK, so they might send him to media training and turn him into something personable, but I don’t know. If I see once more that “I starred in Brokeback Mountain” photograph which he insists on handing out to the media, my mind will blank him out altogether.
Some days ago, he made public his proposals for a better Malta: I have a dream, yadayadayadayada. Martin Luther King’s famous words are devalued by six notches further. DoctorJosephMuscat (one word, remember) has a dream that he will make Malta “the best in Europe.” Oh for God’s sake, man – grow up. The best in Europe at what? And why do we have to be the best when mere normality is what we all crave and are repeatedly denied? What now, the Denmark of the Mediterranean? The Sweden of the Middle Sea?
These people are so damned exhausting with their high-flown talk and their projects for castles in the air. All we want is to have our roads fixed and our towns cleaned up, jobs and earnings and a quiet life, and they insist on ramming their pseudo-Utopian dreams down our throats like cod-liver oil.
DoctorJosephMuscat’s I-have-a-dream sounded even odder when I read the details because it appeared as though he hasn’t been in Malta much and doesn’t know what’s going on, and that he hasn’t read the Nationalist Party’s electoral programme.
He wants job creation and full employment to be made a priority (we’re near full employment already, and there are more jobs than people in several new sectors). He wants public health services to be the best and free of charge (wake up, sir). And he wants everyone to have access to information technology, with access to the internet considered “a basic right” (never one to miss out on a bit of melodrama, this chap – basic right, indeed).
If DoctorJosephMuscat really means what he says then he belongs in the Nationalist Party. If he meant this all along, and didn’t just dream it up now (“I have a dream…”) then we must ask what he was doing in the Labour Party when the only way of achieving his “dream” for Malta was through the Nationalist Party.
While he was barracking Eddie Fenech Adami at pre-electoral press conferences like Charlon Gouder with Lawrence Gonzi this time around, while he was writing articles telling us that DoctorAlfredSant (one word, remember) was right and that EU membership would be disastrous for Malta, while he was behaving like the puppy on the His Master’s Voice record label, all the action was going on elsewhere – in the Nationalist Party.
I am beginning to suspect that the main reason Muscat – he wasn’t DoctorJosephMuscat in those days – joined the Labour Party rather than the Nationalist Party is because he perceived correctly that, with such an immense dearth of competition, he would be able to ingratiate himself with The Leadership and worm his way to the top. The only thing we can credit him with at this stage is the fact that he quite obviously had the foresight to see that it was only a matter of time before he became party leader.
As I have had occasion to repeat in the past, the Labour Party is notoriously devoid of quality control systems and we are about to see once more the deep danger that poses.
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