The Prime Minister reshuffled his Cabinet yesterday afternoon and what do you know, he didn’t even have the courage to face the press and take their questions. He remained behind the firmly locked gates of Girgenti Palace, and occasionally sent out trays of biscuits and Kurt Farrugia, his chief of communications, to ask after the reporters’ health and well-being as they waited.
Then we got some tweets from the Prime Minister. He tweeted that Karmenu Vella would be Malta’s new EU Commissioner, for instance – an extraordinary way to release such a serious bit of news. Then we got the list of who swopped places with whom. Edward Zammit Lewis was promoted and got Karmenu Vella’s job. Jose Herrera got another slap in the face by being moved sideways, from one PS portfolio to another, instead of being promoted to minister as he believes is his due. And Edward Scicluna, who was expected to be nominated as EU Commissioner, with Zammit Lewis being made finance minister in his stead, stayed on in his post. How did that story about him going to Brussels begin, anyway? And Zammit Lewis as finance minister – what was that all about? Whoever leaked it did so deliberately. But what purpose did the misinformation serve?
Did Scicluna want the Commissioner’s job? He might very well have, yes. But then why is Karmenu Vella being dispatched to Brussels instead? There can only be two reasons: the Prime Minister needs to remove him because these old dinosaurs in his cabinet are becoming an obstruction to his curious ambitions (Marie Louise Coleiro refers), or Vella himself wanted the job, asked for it, and got it because the Prime Minister owes him one or several (or because he’s worried about what Vella might do otherwise). Karmenu Vella has every reason to want the EU Commissioner’s job. It’s not just the salary and pension and kudos he’s after. It’s going to be one, long family sojourn there, with his five years coinciding exactly with those of Miriam Dalli the soon-to-be Labour MEP. She is married to his son and they have a baby. So it’s all very convenient.
Of course, people now can’t wait for the grilling at the European Parliament. Karmenu Vella is one of the least eloquent and expressive men available to the Prime Minister, and that’s saying a great deal. He is also incapable of memorising and dealing with facts, figures and statistics, and dealing with them intelligently. He was always that way, but age has taken a greater toll on him than it has on most of his contemporaries, and his public speaking has been more harshly affected. His ability to think on his feet isn’t that good anymore (not that it ever was, but in the Maltese context he can rely on other things instead) and he was never particularly well-educated. He won’t be speaking in the Maltese context and being grilled by a battery of non-Maltese politicians might well be as startling and disturbing a revelation to him as it was to, for example, Edward Scicluna.
It is a fair bet that we are going to be embarrassed and compromised by Malta’s EU Commissioner all over again. Lawrence Gonzi sent John Dalli to do that job so as to get him off his back (it spectacularly failed to work). Now Joseph Muscat is sending Karmenu Vella there to insult the European Commission and make it clear what he thinks about Malta having to be a member of the Union. First, he sells EU passports, and now he installs a Mintoffian relic of the 1970s in the European Commission. “There, that’s what I think about you – so take that.” I wonder what portfolio they’ll give Vella, and what sort of mess he’ll make of it.
As for Konrad Mizzi, he certainly is the super hero. Now he is Minister for Health and Energy, which makes him sound like a vitamin drink for children. And that, too, is another typical Muscat insult, this time to Godfrey Farrugia. It’s his way of saying to Farrugia in public: “Look, you couldn’t cope with just the health portfolio, but I think that Konrad Mizzi can cope with both health and energy.”
But he obviously can’t. It’s going to be a right royal mess and then John Dalli is going to have to move in to save the day with his daughter and a couple of friends from John Dalli & Associates.
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