It was announced late yesterday evening (just as I had finished writing my column and had to start all over again) that John Dalli is to be the new Minister for Health. Well, not in so many words, because Maltese law does not allow for government ministers who do not have a seat in Parliament. Dalli doesn’t have one, though he is certain to contest the 2018 general election, pushing 70 and on the Labour ticket, given that the party seems partial to turning itself into a semi-gerontocracy and some people, Dalli included, never seem to know when the time has come to clear out, clear off and make way for the next generation.

It’s also curious how the party leader (and Prime Minister) seems to crave the attention and approval of older men, while at the same time he appears to derive satisfaction from having power over them as they scurry around doing his bidding. It’s not something one would wish to think about too much or look at too closely.

So John Dalli has been given the job of “reforming” Malta’s general hospital, which is effectively the Minister of Health’s remit and one which Dalli cannot do properly or well without also reforming Gozo’s general hospital and the numerous health centres around both islands, all of which feed into and off each other. Nor can Dalli do any of this without calling the shots while the now-Minister-of-Health-in-name-alone, Godfrey Farrugia, caves in and obeys then goes home to cry on his girlfriend’s shoulder.

Farrugia does not strike me as the sort of personality who will have bounced off the walls at having Dalli imposed on him, or the kind who will (metaphorically speaking) draw a gun on Dalli if he so much as tries to trespass on his patch of grass. Now Marlene Farrugia would have been a different prospect altogether. Watching Dalli try to over-rule her would be interesting, and let’s not discount the possibility that at some stage she’s going to come flying out to defend her man from being mowed down by the former Prisoner of Brussels.

What all this means is that the Prime Minister, a little after the rest of the country perhaps, has worked out that Godfrey Farrugia just can’t hack it. First Farrugia tried to use his girlfriend – who he relies on a great deal – as his ministerial doppelganger, and when that blew up in his face after the two of them appeared together at an early press conference, he became flustered and harassed and even shed tears at another press conference. The tears were touching, but they also made him, because of his position, look weak, incompetent and already drowning just a few weeks into the job.

The obvious thing to do would be to sack Godfrey Farrugia (and with him, the assortment of his girlfriend’s relatives with whom he has lined his office) and appoint somebody else as health minister. The problem, though, is who. Despite boasting about having a wide and deep pool of talent from which to choose – unlike the Nationalist Party, he said – Joseph Muscat had to resort to poor old Godfrey, a nice man and a gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly but who is patently not up to the job.

So Muscat drafts in John Dalli, the very same who the Labour Party targeted with accusations of corruption and wrong-doing for two decades after 1987, and for whom the Labour-leaning press even developed a special moniker, HuBastjan, after Bastjan Dalli, his brother, was involved in suspect dealings but wriggled out of them.

We are supposed to believe that this decision was taken after a spontaneous 20-minute meeting between Dalli and the Prime Minister on Friday, a meeting so spontaneous and so exploratory that the television cameras and reporters were summoned to film the handshakes. Dalli said that he had “offered his services” to both the Nationalist Party and to the Labour Party, but received no response from the former so he decided to go with the latter.

That is about the sum of the man’s personality: he’s in politics not for the ideology or for the set of beliefs. By his own admission he’d have gone with whichever party would have had him, and he appears not to make the distinction between party and government. He says that he offered himself up to “both parties” but it’s not the Labour Party he’s taken a job with. It’s the government.

In any case, I don’t believe that he would have been happy to return to the Nationalist Party even if they wanted him. Dalli likes power and he likes places where he can make rewarding decisions. He likes opportunities and he likes those opportunities to be interesting. The Nationalist Party, lacking power, does not offer scope for any of this. In its current situation, it is for those who are satisfied by pure politics, and I don’t imagine for one moment that Dalli would be interested in that unless he gets to take control. And that’s not going to happen because there is a new leader already.

There’s another reason why I don’t believe it. It cannot be more obvious that Joseph Muscat struck some deal with John Dalli quite a while back. Dalli spent much of the last couple of years making flying visits to Malta from Brussels so as to rave, on the Labour Party’s television station, against Lawrence Gonzi’s government and in favour of that power station company he was backing and for which he had worked as a paid consultant at some point. When Dalli emerged from the President of the European Commission’s office, where he was given 30 minutes to clear his desk and resign or be fired, the first person he called was the Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Muscat, and not the Prime Minister. We know this because Muscat himself said so. Now, why would Dalli do that?

Dalli also sat it out in Brussels with a psychiatrist’s certificate saying that he was too unwell to fly to Malta and face the “psycho-social” trauma of what awaited him here in the form of a police investigation and possible courtroom drama. The certificate protected him against travel before early March, which was jolly convenient and meant that it didn’t take much imagination to see what was coming next. Labour was elected, Joseph Muscat became prime minister, and Dalli immediately flew back to Malta, fit as a fiddle and free of ‘psycho-social’ trauma which had mysteriously vanished. The two senior policemen investigating his case, Police Commissioner John Rizzo and Assistant Commissioner Michael Cassar, were summarily removed and replaced, and the incoming Police Commissioner, Peter Paul Zammit, made it a matter of first and most pressing business to announce that there is no case against John Dalli. Next thing we know, and Dalli is, effectively, the Labour Minister for Health.

Meanwhile, something rather strange is happening. Whatever their private and personal thoughts, people have stopped boasting in public, or even in small groups, about having voted Labour. I don’t mean the diehards, obviously not, but the more crucial pre-9 March it’s-now-cool-to-be-Labour. They might still be pleased with their decision in private and when talking to pollsters, but it’s very telling that for the remainder, they’re beginning to think that others might now be taking a dim view of their judgement so they say nothing.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com