Maybe the prime minister doesn’t understand this yet (I’m sure he does, and that there are other reasons for his inability to control his men) but by allowing members of his cabinet to breach their own code of conduct, he has made a rather nasty noose for his neck, one that will eventually lead to his near or complete strangulation.
The code of conduct/ethics is a set of standards. No waivers are possible because by definition this means allowing somebody to operate beneath that set standard, which is unacceptable. Besides being unacceptable – a standard is a standard is a standard, and there is no point in having standards if they are not met – waivers are a very bad idea because they create a system of preferential treatment, and preferential treatment builds resentment and dissent among those who are not so preferred.
There can be no middle ground, with a code of conduct from which special exceptions are made for individual ministers or parliamentary secretaries. There can be only a uniform code which is uniformly adhered to, or no code at all, with a complete free for all.
The prime minister has discovered the truth of this already: that by granting a ‘waiver’ to the PS for the Elderly, the ophthalmic surgeon Franco Mercieca, he has opened the gates of hell. A sort of civil disobedience campaign has begun among other members of his cabinet, with one of his most senior ministers, foreign minister George Vella, still seeing patients as a general practitioner, though he has called them constituents, and with his health minister Godfrey Farrugia still turning up at Brown’s Pharmacy in Haz-Zebbug until a few weeks ago, when he was door-stepped there by a reporter and photographer from this newspaper.
These others must reason that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the PS for the Elderly is permitted to see patients, then why not also the foreign minister, the health minister and even the PS for the MEPA, Michael Farrugia, who is a medicine man too? And if the medicine men are allowed to carry on seeing patients, it is then a matter of time before the lawyers in the cabinet demand that they be permitted to see their clients and defend them in court. No, they won’t demand that. They will simply go right ahead and do it, defying the prime minister to just try stopping them. I predict that Jose Herrera, rippling with resentment and in cahoots with Jason Micallef, will be the first to break ranks. After all, if Franco Mercieca can do it...
You can see where all this is coming from. When a prime minister is incautious with the maxim that politics is the art of compromise, he sets up a tangled web for himself that will only worsen the more he struggles to break free from the complications. The last five years were replete with evidence of this, and however well-intentioned those compromises with individuals were, the end result was, inevitably, disastrous. Now, this code of conduct issue holds the seeds of an incipient crisis, which will surge and grow until it eventually blows up, and its root can be traced to the single, original compromise made with Franco Mercieca before the general election. There can be little doubt that Mercieca was persuaded on board the Labour electoral bandwagon only with the promise of a seat in the cabinet. Otherwise, why would somebody like that even bother? He does not seem to me to be magnetised by politics and current affairs. Yet to hold a seat in cabinet he would have had to not only stop operating on people at the state hospital, which has public-service issues for those with a conscience about where their contribution is most valuable, whether it is in politics or in medicine, but more crucially, Mercieca would have had to relinquish an extremely lucrative private practice, operating on patients in private clinics and hospitals almost every day, for hundreds if not thousands of euros a throw.
Put down on paper, the choice is an immediate no-brainer. Mercieca was faced with a decision between providing a much-needed public service at the state hospital (the moral imperative) while earning pots of money providing the same service at private clinics (the pecuniary incentive), and giving all that up to do politics in cabinet (the transient petty power and importance incentive), which could be done by somebody else. Like all sensible people, he would have seen it as no choice at all and stuck with the former, so then Opposition leader Muscat would have had to find a way of persuading him otherwise. The only way to do that would have been by promising Mercieca that he would be allowed to stick with his medical profession while also maintaining a seat in the cabinet.
Muscat then further compounded the problem he had set up for himself, at the pre-electoral stage, by not giving Franco Mercieca the cabinet portfolio he wanted – the health ministry – and instead appointing him to the far more junior post of parliamentary secretary for old people and the disabled, under the authority of Minister Marie Louise Coleiro. So he has now created a situation in which Mercieca obviously feels not just belittled but also tricked (“Didn’t I promise you a post in the cabinet? I’ve given you one. I never actually said I would make you health minister.”). So he is even less likely to cooperate on requests to give up his medical practice, even if this preferential treatment leads to mass insubordination in the ranks. With ministers and parliamentary secretaries working at their private practices, we have a situation on our hands that has little to do with meritocracy and is about to become one of burgeoning patronage.