It is really exhausting, but one suspects that is the intention, the way the government has carried on with the tactic it used so successfully in Opposition. When it is criticised, and unable to answer to that criticism, it creates a sandstorm which obscures the original argument and sends the media and anybody who happens to be listening off down another track altogether.
This has happened again now. Under a barrage of heavy fire provoked by ex Police Commissioner Rizzo’s testimony under oath in court, and by stories last week in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (which ran its report on the news-stand visible top-front page) about fresh EU Commission investigations into John Dalli’s behaviour, the prime minister has reacted with a diversionary tactic. Instead of answering to the criticism and justifying his position – he has asked his former party deputy leader, in his new role as Speaker of the House, to rule against the Opposition leader for accusing him of interfering in the Dalli case.
The Speaker gave his ruling, citing chapter and verse. Predictably, a storm has blown up which the prime minister hopes will obscure the original issue: his support (for he has appointed him consultant to the government in charge of hospital reform) of John Dalli. So far, this hasn’t happened. Instead of discussing the breach of privilege ruling and the Opposition’s abrupt departure from parliament, the reporters who clustered around the prime minister this morning continued to focus on the real story: that plans to prosecute Dalli were dropped with the change of Police Commissioner, and that the prime minister continues to retain and support Dalli in the face of all this.
The prime minister, faced with these hostile questions – a situation to which he is unaccustomed after a couple of years of playing the role of media darling while the press ripped another prime minister to shreds – wore his highly visible trademark frown. It is supposed to come across as a frown of concentration. In reality, he wears it only when he knows a difficult question is coming and he’s going to have to bluff his way out of it.
Summer ennui and the new government’s honeymoon lull are both now well and truly over, and this is where Joseph Muscat and his communications gurus begin to learn the hard way that what works in Opposition absolutely does not work in power. When you are in power, the electorate’s perception of you is entirely different. You are no longer the underdog, the victim, the vulnerable one, the brave hero. In the electorate’s eyes, you become the perpetrator, the one getting up to stuff that you shouldn’t be getting up to.
Joseph Muscat and his people are using the same methods they used in Opposition, with expectations of the same success. They cannot be more wrong in this. He is now the one taking the decisions, so reporters are now going to him not for opinions, but for facts and answers. He should remember that those reporters are accustomed to a very different sort of prime minister: one who respected them even as they tore him apart. Those same reporters will not take kindly to a prime minister who is as slippery as an eel, who is evasive and who directs them to criticise the Opposition instead of criticising him.
The government is using the same stock responses that the Labour Party used in Opposition. Those responses are now long hackneyed and tired. They worked in the excitement of the election campaign, when Labour presented itself as bright and new and shiny. They worked for a little while afterwards, when the government was still fresh out of the wrapping-paper. They do not work now, not anymore. When the prime minister is faced with sharp and justified criticism, when worried accusations are made that he or those close to him have worked to save the man from the wheels of justice, the proper response is not to tell us that Simon Busuttil and the Nationalist Party are isolated and negative, that they are not being positive, and that they have learned nothing from their defeat. The proper response is to answer the question.
It seems that Joseph Muscat and his party have learned nothing from their victory. By being positive where there are no grounds for being so, they are isolating themselves from reality, and reality has a nasty habit of biting you hard where it hurts most.