It was sort of shocking to watch that post-Budget press conference featuring the three financial magicians of our future government – Edward Scicluna, Charlie Mangion and Karmenu ‘Il-Guy’ Vella. Even for me, with my total lack of illusions about their competence, it was something of a great, big reality check.

Good Lord, I thought out loud, we really do have our finger on the suicide button, don’t we? Those three old men who refuse to retire just haven’t a clue, and worse than that, they don’t even have the ability to pretend that they don’t have a clue. These guys can’t even address a press conference or answer a serious question from a serious journalist without sounding like dangerous idiots, and yet we’re going to pick them to run the country.

The professor of economics fiddled and fudged. The notary on land deals involving major developers who his party then tears to shreds shilly-shallied and talked cowpats. And Il-Guy – well, he really stole the show. Yes, Labour will reduce electricity rates in its first year of government, he said. Then five minutes later, “Did I say that? No, I didn’t say that. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I said.” Meanwhile, the reporters massed before him looked askance at each other and at him with astonishment. The professor had the good grace to look ever so slightly embarrassed. And the notary looked like he wished he were at some major deal for the sale of 10 fields to Ic-Caqnu by the Mintoff sisters (too bad that went to Alex Sceberras Trigona).

I’d noticed already that Il-Guy seems to have developed concentration problems and memory problems and sticking to the point problems and communication problems and possibly even IQ problems. He might well have had them already, but he’s not been on television as much as he has been lately, so I wouldn’t have picked them up. It’s not like we have dinner once a week to catch up on the news. When he was a guest on Bondì+ some months ago, and Lou Bondì pushed him for an answer on some question he was busy avoiding, Il-Guy replied, “I have the answer. I have the answer. Mela le, I have the answer. Let me give it to you. Here it is.” And he pulled out a couple of sheets of paper, looked at them blankly, got confused, then pushed them across the table to his host and interviewer. “Ha,” he said to Bondì. “Read it yourself.” Bondì, looking perplexed, picked up the paper and read out the answer, while Il-Guy nodded. Sitting there on my sofa, I said, Uh-oh. Houston, we have a really serious problem.

But there was more, and it was worse. Karmenu Vella decided that he would use the language he knows best, thinking that speaking to journalists at a press conference is like speaking to a crowd of geriatric Labour delegates from socio-economic group DE, who left school at 12 if they ever went at all. And the language Il-Guy knows best is Mintoffspeak – you know, parables, metaphors, that kind of thing (communication for stupid and/or illiterate people). Never has Il-Guy looked and sounded so out of date, so out of synch with the times, such a deteriorating piece of detritus from the past we would rather forget but can’t. Nobody speaks like that anymore, not to literate people with university degrees anyway, and the man who dubbed Mintoff’s reign ‘the Golden Years’ just doesn’t know it.

At a loss how to explain Labour’s decision to vote against the budget while promising to adopt it anyway (it can’t, because the numbers will not be equal and the mess that this promise will create between now and then will be unquantifiable), he gave up and said, as that other jerk Dom Mintoff might have done: “Look, this is like when you have two cooks and you give them the same ingredients and tell them to come up with a dish, and then you see who has the better dish. We would rather buy the ingredients ourselves, but hekk, li hemm hemm.”

My younger colleagues in the field found this utterly incredible. What, the future finance minister, the man with whom we are being asked to replace Tonio Fenech, can talk about Labour’s financial plans only by using the metaphor of Ready, Steady, Cook? I felt like yawning in a blasé fashion: “Dah-lings, what do you expect? This wretched old fool was Mintoff’s Minister of Industry. I remember him speaking on Xandir Malta and laughing adoringly at Mintoff’s crude jokes and daft parables on the back of a lorry. And I see he’s still flapping his manicured hands about, and bully Mintoff never called him a sissy for doing it, though he might have done so in private.”

But you see, that’s just the problem. Because Karmenu Vella was last a cabinet minister in 1987, he’s actually being treated as brand new – change – by a huge chunk of the electorate who are too young to remember him in his black-haired days signing agreements with his camp-uniformed friend Muammar with the medals and the tight trousers and the Village People headgear, and being carried shoulder-high at the shows of power and might that drove all sensible people to cower indoors and pray for... change.

And now we’re going to get that change. We’re going to get Karmenu Vella all over again, this time as finance minister in the middle of a major financial crisis. Karmenu Vella, the shadow finance minister who wasn’t even trusted by his own party to sit beside the finance minister and discuss the Budget on Bondi+, lest he embarrass them with some more talk of cooking and ingredients. They sent Owen Bonnici instead. Impressive. Strap yourself in for the joyride.

 

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