Shameless people seem to be preternaturally attracted to one another. The Prime Minister yesterday morning gave a press conference with Martin Schulz, who is being put forward by the Socialist Group in the European Parliament as their candidate for the post of President of the European Commission, replacing Jose Manuel Barroso.

A journalist asked Schulz what he thinks about how the Labour Party says that its aim is to win the majority of votes in this election and not necessarily the majority of seats, that it would be happy with three seats if it still wins more votes than the Nationalist Party. Schulz’s response was that the Socialists would be happy anywhere in Europe to be in the position the Labour Party is in here in Malta (of course, because socialist parties have fallen out of favour practically across Europe and Malta is invariably out of step). He said that he would like the Labour Party in Malta to win as many seats as possible because “every seat counts to make me President”.

It is the European Parliament that votes for the presidential candidates, and they tend to vote with their group. In other words, Martin Schulz was not in Malta to help his friend Joseph Muscat and his Labour Party, but to help himself. He’s raising the socialist vote to increase the number of socialist seats in the European Parliament and, in turn, raise the number of votes for himself and become President of the European Commission.

 

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At the same press conference, another journalist asked the Prime Minister why he had lionised former electoral candidate Cyrus Engerer the previous evening, when he has just been convicted of a crime committed against another person. Do you condone what Engerer did, the journalist asked?

You could see the set of the Prime Minister’s face changing as he listened to the question, from self-satisfaction to cold anger and irritation. “That is a loaded question if ever there was one,” he responded. Then, instead of answering the ‘loaded’ question, he went on to laud Engerer as a civil rights campaigner and a valid part of the Labour movement. He ended with his usual tu quoque parting shot: “The Nationalist Party has one MP who has a criminal conviction and another MP who has admitted a criminal charge. I don’t think the Leader of the Opposition condones criminal charges.”

Even the self-regarding Martin Schulz had the good grace to shift uncomfortably while this was going on. I felt at that point that another journalist (the one who had asked the question had been relieved of his microphone and could be heard protesting off-mike that the Prime Minister had failed to answer him) should have leapt in to address a variant of the same question to Schulz: “How would you have dealt with the situation, when you led the Socialist Group, if one of your MEPs had been served with a suspended prison sentence of two years?”

 

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As is usual with the Prime Minister’s tu quoque retorts, this particular one was designed to damage his target, mislead his audience and silence his interrogator by wrong-footing him with the belief that the Prime Minister knew something he did not.

Immediately, people would have begun to wonder, who are these criminals in the Nationalist Party’s parliamentary group? And the journalist would have stopped pressing for information in case he was made to look a fool by the Prime Minister’s secret stash of info. I made a few phone calls. It turns out that the criminal conviction to which the Prime Minister referred is a conviction Claudio Grech received when he was 19, for faking an ID. Grech is now 40. The magistrate’s judgement had described it as a childish act from which there was no intention to profit. Grech was given a conditional discharge, which means that he never even had a police record.

Abusively, the Prime Minister has sought to put the conditional discharge of a teenager who wasn’t a politician at the time, 21 years ago, in the same rank and category as a two-year prison sentence handed down a few days ago by the Court of Appeal to a prominent politician in his 30s, for a vindictive act of harassment, blackmail and threat.

Nobody knows to whom or to what the Prime Minister was referring in the other Nationalist MP who, he claims, “admitted to a criminal charge” (he made the distinction between this and a criminal conviction). When I rang the information office of the Nationalist Party for further clarification, I was told that the parliamentary group had been questioned one by one and nobody had any idea what the Prime Minister was on about.

Later on in the day, the Opposition leader held a press conference and I expected the Labour Party media to raise the matter and challenge Busuttil with questions about it. But they didn’t. Perhaps even they realise how ridiculous their leader’s ‘tu quoque’ response was in comparing the conditional discharge of a 19-year-old private citizen, more than two decades ago, with a prison sentence meted out to a serving politician and electoral candidate earlier in the week.

 

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