The defiant John Dalli, consultant to the Prime Minister and Government of Malta, is once more challenging and belittling the European Commission’s (renewed) investigation into his activities, challenging the Commission to do its worst. His irritation is the result of a fresh wave of press interest following the high-profile publication of a news story on the matter in The New York Times a few days ago, which was carried also on the newsstand visible front page of its international edition, the International Herald Tribune.
John Dalli cannot credibly accuse The New York Times of colluding with and being subject to the machinations of his enemies, but be sure that he does his best. “It’s all media hype,” he told this newspaper a couple of days ago about the story in one of the world’s top newspapers. “There are lots of contradictory reports, and I will form an opinion when I have a clearer picture of things.”
This is quite unbelievable. He is the one person who knows exactly what he did or did not do, and it is not up to him to form an opinion. It is up to the rest of us, based on his refusal to divulge the facts, his hysteria when confronted with those the press succeed in uncovering, and his undignified behaviour, when asked to resign from his EU Commission post.
And once more, he attempts to deploy his usual tactic of portraying himself as the victim of malign forces in the form of unnamed individuals who are operating behind the scenes to have him destroyed. Oh, the irony of that. His disingenuousness is quite insufferable.
When former police commissioner John Rizzo spoke in court last Thursday and said that Members of Parliament and the press had created a lot of pressure about Dalli’s case, what he meant was the obvious: that the investigation of any such high-profile case in the full glare of publicity and political debate creates an atmosphere of enormous pressure. You would have to be very literal-minded not to understand that. Crucially, he made it clear that the Prime Minister never spoke to him about the case, nor did anybody in the government.
Yet Dalli told this newspaper: “Who in Parliament and the media was putting pressure on the police? Parliament has not discussed the issue as far as I know. So was someone using a parliament phone to put pressure on the police? And which newspapers pressured the police?” Such rubbish – but it is, sadly, all too believable from somebody who has taken paranoia and misleading rhetoric almost to an art form. What does ‘using a parliament phone’ have to do with the price of eggs? Does he really expect us to believe his conjured scenario of a mysterious voice at the other end of an anonymous telephone call, which equally mysteriously managed to get through directly to the Police Commissioner, ‘putting pressure on’ the police boss without using threats (which he would otherwise have mentioned in court) and the police boss then tracing the call and saying, “My God, it comes from a parliament phone.”
This is Dalli Potter for grown-ups with the intelligence quotient of a turtle. Crucially, the former police commissioner never mentioned political parties, but had he done so, I have little doubt that he would have specified how he felt himself more under pressure from the Labour Party and its aggressive fellow-travellers not to arraign John Dalli. And that’s why he was careful to spell out that nobody in Gonzi’s government, not even the Prime Minister himself, talked to him about it. Bear in mind that John Rizzo was well aware at the time that he was investigating a man who clearly had the protection and support of the Opposition leader and the Labour Party, a fact that the Opposition leader pointedly communicated by saying on the record that Dalli rang him, not the Malta government, immediately he left Barroso’s office on being given half an hour to clear his desk. That would have immediately told Rizzo all he needed to know, even if he had not worked it out as the rest of us did, from Labour television’s courtship of him.
Dismay is being expressed anew, even by those who voted Labour, that the Prime Minister continues to associate himself with this man, to defend him while saying that “Europe doesn’t tell us what to do”, and to allow him the run of the general hospital and its supply, services and operations systems as the unofficial health minister. My considered view is that he has no choice. I do not share the view that what we have here is a straightforward deal involving payment in kind now for Dalli’s services in helping Labour bring down Lawrence Gonzi and his government. And that’s why I do not ask why the Prime Minister doesn’t break the deal and save himself a lot of grief and harsh criticism.
The Prime Minister does not break the deal because he cannot, rather than will not, do so. This has not been a deal so much as a Faustian pact. He cannot break it because he is caught in some kind of bind, the precise details of which we shall probably never know, just as we will probably never know exactly what Dalli was up to in the Bahamas with an international fraudster once jailed for using a false passport, and what he was up to with his man Silvio Zammit.
The Prime Minister’s refusal to dispense with John Dalli’s services, cease protecting him, and distance himself from him can, if you think about it, only be because he knows that the consequences of doing so will be, for him and his electoral chances in 2018, far more grievous than the consequences of not doing so.
Muscat has seen already – and unlike the rest of us, he has been privy to the uglier details – how John Dalli behaves when he wishes to exact vengeance. He has, indeed, used that savage, stop-at-nothing amorality to his own ends and advantage. And this was when Dalli had nothing to talk about and had to resort to fabrications, accusations and wild paranoiac declarations of persecution. How much greater, then, is his scope for assault when he actually is privy to the details of Labour’s pre-electoral dealings and machinations?
It is not the Prime Minister who won’t let Dalli go, but Dalli who won’t let the Prime Minister go. Joseph Muscat is John Dalli’s prisoner. He is afraid of him and what he can do. He keeps him close because the consequences of not doing so are dangerous for him. Before the election, Muscat courted Dalli to achieve victory. Now, he courts him to save himself. If you are one of those asking why Muscat continues to protect Dalli now that he no longer needs him to win the election, you are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is what Dalli can say that Muscat is afraid he will say if the two fall out.
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