Marlene Farrugia speaks like an outsider. That means the health minister must feel like one.
Marlene Farrugia, the Labour MP who lives with the Health Minister, has been in the news rather a lot lately. There seems to be the general feeling that she is at odds with her own party, and strangely enough, it is for reasons with which those who voted for the other party agree. This is one of those situations in which politicians, like those who vote for them, fail to realise that political parties are not band-clubs. They are not something which you join as a member so much as something whose political beliefs, values and policies you agree with and share.
Ms Farrugia is as misguided in her statements and her reasoning as those electors who insist on thinking of themselves as Nationalists while voting Labour, a party with whose attitude and outlook they clearly feel more comfortable, even if they once did not feel at ease being associated with the party itself. If Ms Farrugia finds that she agrees far more with key Nationalist Party policies and thinking than she does with Labour’s, then that is something to which she should give some serious thought. It doesn’t mean that she should cross the floor or start championing the Nationalist Party; people never think highly of the sort who do that, and with good reason. It doesn’t seem decent, and that behaviour has more recently been associated with blackguards, quislings and knaves.
Perhaps this is the real reason why Marlene Farrugia has said that she will withdraw from electoral politics after this term is out. I don’t think it is mainly because the Health Minister, who she clearly loves dearly (and he, her) is under insidious assault by the very government of which he forms part. It is true that she has defended him in public, saying that he should not be disposed of in any upcoming cabinet reshuffle, but I think it goes a long way beyond that. I really do believe that Marlene Farrugia has begun to feel increasingly at odds with the Labour Party for reasons of policy, attitude and behaviour. From the few dealings I have had with her, I can tell that she’s not that sort of person, and that she is forever twisting herself into strange shapes to justify to herself that certain Labour policies are right and that she is right to support them. She also has a noted tendency, after a period of disquiet with something or other that the government has done, to speak in public, either via comments to the press or pointed remarks on Facebook, about how she is has now convinced herself that everything is fine. When people do that, you just know that they are not convinced at all, and that they are still uneasy.
Marlene Farrugia gave an interview to this newspaper (published yesterday), in which she said that by speaking out in public when she disagrees with something the prime minister or the government has done or is planning to do, she is demonstrating her loyalty towards both. Her stated reasoning is that, by criticising them in public, she is the spur to change in their behaviour. Well, hardly.
The proper place for a member of parliament on the government benches, whose life companion sits in the cabinet, to criticise the decisions of that cabinet would be in a private communication to the prime minister. Criticism in the public domain is a mark of hostility – the first person to be annoyed, were the situation normal, would be her life companion, the health minister, who forms part of the government she is criticising. The fact that Ms Farrugia delivers her criticism of the government on the public stage means that her life companion feels he has been marginalised. Ms Farrugia and the Health Minister are joined at the hip. If she speaks as a government outsider, then that is how he must feel.
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