The government is using as justification for its decision to appoint members of parliament to the boards of state agencies and corporations the fact that the last government made Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology.

To claim that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s appointment to the chair of the Malta Council for Science and Technology board is justification for your own appointments of MPs to other boards is the sort of flawed logic used by fascists who feel themselves above and beyond public scrutiny.

But it is exactly the sort of tit-for-tat defensive justification we have come to expect from the prime minister. When he was leader of the Opposition, this is precisely why the then prime minister found it so difficult to debate with him. Muscat argues like a difficult husband trying to block rational discussion with his wife, by fending off what he perceives to be troublesome or annoying accusations with a “You’re the one who did ...” (something totally unrelated) or “I’m not the one who ...” (ditto). It is a way of controlling the situation, defeating his critic through verbal and emotional stonewalling rather than engagement in debate and rational discourse, and a display of power by effectively stating that you don’t respect the other party/person, or those they represent, sufficiently to accord them a proper explanation.

Muscat has been doing this all his working life, so there’s nothing new there, even though it may seem new to some electors who are only just beginning to notice it even if they have noticed it at all. When he was a Super One reporter he did it all the time. Years ago, 2001 perhaps, I gave him a right and proper rollicking, demanding to know what possessed him to include my name and photograph in a book about the Italian P2 and its criminal associations, which he wrote and had published by Sensiela Kotba Socjalisti. “You must be insane to do something like that,” I said. “For God’s sake, I wasn’t even born when some of those things happened, and was at school when those other events you describe happened in Italy.”

We were sitting outside a courtroom, waiting to be called for a libel case which I had filed against him, and which I won even on appeal. Joseph Muscat’s response? While not looking directly at me – I noticed in the electoral campaign that he has to make a point of looking into the eyes of people he speaks to, as though he has been trained and reminded to do so because it doesn’t come naturally – and adopting highly defensive body language, he retorted simply, “Mhux jien mort naghmel...bhalek” (something totally and absolutely unrelated to the subject in hand, but which he felt put him at an advantage over me in the discussion, which it did not).

Because here’s the thing – Joseph Muscat does not treat debates and discussions as a way of building relationships, engaging and explaining. He deals with them as a way of gaining advantage for himself and asserting his superiority. I suspect, though I do so only on the basis of having seen some ‘outsider’ children do this to make themselves feel better about not belonging to the group (smart-alec replies designed to fend off bullying and victimisation), that this is a defence mechanism he developed in the school playground.

As an only child growing up surrounded by old people and those in late middle age, he was deprived of one of the most crucial ways in which people learn how to engage with others at the same level in a normal manner: siblings. Smart-alec a sibling and he or she will quickly bring you into line with a ticking-off or a thump. This starts in the nursery, where toddler siblings who don’t yet have language skills will pound each other with toys until parents come running to stop the affray, if one is getting out of line or above himself,

 

What probably started out as a defence mechanism to cope with social inadequacy Muscat grew to use to his advantage when he began to realise that such out-of-left-field responses floor people and leave them wordless and uncertain how to respond. But it can only work in politics and public life for a limited time. Before long, those who have to deal with this kind of response on a regular basis, and this will now include the electors who put him where he is today, become increasingly alienated by this refusal to give proper answers. His interlocutors begin to feel that something is wrong, only they are not quite sure what it is. Eventually, they will realise that Muscat won’t, or simply can’t, engage with them in the normal manner, and that they have been left guessing, bewildered and frustrated.