I’ve said it several times and I’m going to have to repeat it once more: Labour’s hunger for power makes it look desperate, egocentric and revolting. This is not the early 1980s, or even 1998. These frantic attempts to topple the Prime Minister and his government, with new and more bottom-scraping ruses hatched at every turn, are not designed to get Malta on the road to improvement as quickly as possible. They are designed to put Anglu Farrugia – for I have no doubt he is doing lots of the hatching and pushing – and others who are literally gagging for power and can’t wait even a few months longer, into a position where they can boss us around, run our lives, throw their weight about and feel and act important.

These schemes and strategies are irresponsible precisely because they sacrifice the greater good of the country and the peace of mind of its people to the narrow interests of the Munch Bunch who just can’t wait to get their snouts in the trough.

Is it absolutely imperative to force the Minister of Home Affairs to resign right now, when this government has just a year to go? And for what, anyway, when the man or woman who replaces him will carry on with his policies and initiatives, precisely because they are the policies and initiatives of the government and the Prime Minister, and not of Carm Mifsud Bonnici. It gives great insight into the way that Labour still thinks and plans to behave when it discusses Cabinet ministers in the belief that they act autonomously and do their own thing, rather than carrying out decisions taken collectively at Cabinet level and ‘signed off’ by the Prime Minister.

Perhaps Joseph Muscat’s fresh, young, new and progressive advisers, Karmenu ‘Il-Guy’ Vella and Alex ‘AST’ Sceberras Trigona think things still happen as they did back in the day when they were ministers and ministers were 20th-century robber-baron types with mini-fiefdoms and heavies lining the door to their stronghold.

So Labour and Franco Debono secure the resignation of Malta’s permanent representative in Brussels. Then what? There’s a mad scramble to find somebody who can do the job at least 20 per cent as well as he does, and knows at least 15 per cent of what he does, and we’ll have a new permanent representative in Brussels doing a key and crucial job only a fraction as well as the previous incumbent. But as long as the previous incumbent has been sacrificed to the wrath of Franco Debono and the envy of the Labour Party, the fact that Malta’s interests are not as well served as they were is not important.

Even if Labour doesn’t give a cuss about the best man for the job and all that, even if its standards are so low and its understanding so poor that it thinks that anyone with a BA in ‘European Studies’ can do it (after all, look at the sort of people it calls economists), surely selfish considerations rise to the fore. But not if you’re not particularly bright and can’t see them.

I said the other day that one of the signs of real intelligence is the ability to foresee the consequences of your actions and to assess your options accordingly. Franco Debono has painted himself into a corner, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando digs his hole deeper, Labour can’t see beyond the immediacy of its gagging desire to force an election, and now – stupidly – it is sweating and straining to force Richard Cachia Caruana out of his position in Brussels. Stupidly, because if they are successful, they will have effectively freed up their historical nemesis completely, in every respect, to dedicate himself to the campaign for their defeat. Where would Labour rather have him – safely out of the game in Brussels, or working 24 hours a day on a campaign against them? Clearly, they’re not thinking straight.

And Jeffrey isn’t either

No, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando isn’t thinking straight either. After four years of doing his damnedest to bring the government to its knees, after his public and unrelenting spite towards his party leader and prime minister, after his constant mad scenes on Facebook and his sucking up to Joseph Muscat, for whom his long-term girlfriend has recently become an activist, he has now said on his Facebook wall – which is to him what the mount was to Jesus – that he doesn’t want an early election because he wants to stay on a while longer as chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology.

At first I thought this was crazily egocentric – that again, it’s all about him and that’s the way he sees things. But now I’m not so sure. Now I think he’s being sleazily disingenuous. He’s friendly with Joseph Muscat, he actually invited Muscat on a personal tour of his MCST kingdom, and his girlfriend Carmen is now a keen Labour activist. So what are the odds that Jeffrey knows he will be able to stay on under Labour, and what are the other odds that Muscat will kick him out after he worked so hard – whether intentionally or not – to make Labour victorious, and sooner rather than later?

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