Here we go again, with the first shoots of diehard old Labour paranoia sprouting already among the Chief Fossils in Muscat’s Cabinet of curiosities. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, as they say, and our two most senior ministers – after the primus inter pares – are two old dogs indeed, carry-overs from the Golden Years of Mintoff and KMB.

The finance minister and the foreign minister are bristling all over already, putting their guard up, ringing themselves about with sandbags, bringing in the food-taster and sweeping the room for bugs. They probably even sleep with a nightlight on.

Edward Scicluna, despite his civilised air and conversation, his modulated tones and neat manners, his likeability when chatting face to face, remains the Mintoffian we used to see on Xandir Malta back in the years when we only used to tune in with trepidation to find out, as Dorothy Parker once famously put it, what fresh hell this was. George Vella, with his irascibility, his tantrums when criticised by the media and his loud, angry rants at university students who booed Opposition leader Alfred Sant (I noticed he kept quiet when Prime Minister Gonzi had to face malicious abuse rather than good-natured joshing), and his wish that Malta be restyled ‘Ir-Repubblika ta’ Malta’, is the remnant of another age. Well, after all he is 71 and rather too aged to be starting afresh as a foreign minister for the second time, instead of making way for new blood, a fresh attitude and some 21st-century ideas. He’s another Mintoffian, but there you go. Under Muscat, there’s no getting away from them because they’ve ridden him into power once more.

It is no coincidence that this government’s first cries of paranoia, less than 100 days into power, came from these two. In an interview with this newspaper today, the foreign minister tries to explain away his rant in Parliament about the need to “rein in the media”, which were the words he used and which have a very different meaning to what he later claimed he meant – “the media should control themselves”. He also, and this is more Old Labour still, says that he gave the order for visitors to his office to be divested of their smart-phones for reasons of “national security”. Sensitive conversations take place in his chambers, he said, and he doesn’t want people manipulating them. This is quite unbelievable. If the foreign minister doesn’t wish to be compromised by anything he says, then he shouldn’t say it in the first place. That is the essence of diplomacy, a fact he hasn’t seemed to grasp, and he is effectively Malta’s chief diplomat.

Taking people’s smart-phones away is not just the sort of rampant paranoia you would have expected from Mintoff’s government – Mintoff himself always carried a vacuum flask around with hot drinks he had made himself, and never ate food prepared by others unless it was from a buffet and he could help himself along with others – but it is also the height of appalling manners (ditto re Mintoff). You don’t invite people into your office only to make it clear to them that you don’t trust them. How offensive is that?

And now we have a demonstration of paranoia by the finance minister, who is all over the news media frantically claiming that his shadow and predecessor, Tonio Fenech, is “working against the national interest” by “badmouthing Malta” with the International Monetary Fund. This is because Fenech said to them that he doesn’t think the government can meet its financial obligations. What was he supposed to do, lie? If that’s his considered opinion, then that’s his considered opinion, and let’s face it, he’s far better qualified to have an opinion on the subject than the current incumbent is, given that the current incumbent is only 90 days or so into the job Fenech held for a few years before that.

Common sense dictates that the finance minister and his boss the prime minister, who started all this with his sarcastic comments to the press – “I won’t mention names but somebody has been badmouthing Malta; you can ask around to find out who” – shouldn’t be worried about what Fenech says to the IMF if they have nothing to worry about to begin with. If they are so hassled by what Tonio Fenech told the IMF, then it’s probably because Fenech was right, and because he has credibility with that organisation. You see, what the finance minister and prime minister are saying here, though not in so many words, is that they’re worried because the IMF believes Fenech, that his views carry weight, and that their own views carry less weight and are less likely to be believed than his are. Otherwise, why bother about what he said?

But what really gets me, other than the insecurity of these two (“mummy, he’s been sneaking on me with the IMF”; “daddy, the newspapers are being nasty to me and I’m going to cry”) is the terminology. To those of us who lived through the years, which Scicluna and Vella think of, as golden, the words “undermining the national interest” and “working against the national interest” strike a chill to the heart. In the golden years of Labour, the accusation that one had committed the crime of undermining the national interest would mark one out for a Chinese-style execution (I speak metaphorically, though we were pretty close to the real thing). The “national interest” was such a big thing, a reason for being unto itself, that the anti-government satirical newspaper was called (satirically), Mhux Fl-Interess Tal-Poplu.

In writing this I have realised that we’ve another example of rampant paranoia and national-interest-freakery embedded in the Cabinet. The Minister of Police, Justice, the Army and Broadcasting has been renamed ‘Minister of National Security’, a rehashing of the Home of (Justified) Paranoia’s ‘homeland security’. Malta has never had to suffer terrorist attacks and is a most unlikely magnet for them, so it seems to me that the real reason for this renaming is to conceal, as far as possible, the fact that Manuel Mallia is minister for both justice and the police, and that our new Commissioner of Laws, Franco Debono, has nothing to say about it despite having plenty to say, in hysterical octaves, for years and months beforehand.

 

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