I watched TVM news yesterday evening, a rare thing for me. The hunters had some kind of press event on. They were fronted by a cleverly-chosen Kathleen Grima, a young lawyer from Manuel Mallia’s professional office who looks like a nun in civvies and speaks with quiet determination, her thoughts and sentences coherently organised.
That kind of thing impresses people because it’s the tonality, the well-formed sentences and quiet conviction they pick up on first, and when they do, they tend to ignore the flawed logic and even the arguments themselves. If you give a positive impression by the way you talk, and if you look like a serious and sensible person, for most people that’s enough.
Smart move, I thought (as a professional observation). That young woman, who looks as though she spends the day auditing the books for a firm of accountants, is the perfect foil for the public’s impression of the gun-toting primitives she represents. They had the good sense not to put forward one of their own. It’s quite obvious to anyone that this woman doesn’t pack a pistol or carry a rifle and has never shot anything in her life. So they’ve got a buffer between them and the press. The press are not going to challenge her as though she is one of them, because she isn’t, even though she represents them and has done so professionally for a long time through Emmanuel Mallia & Associates, where she works.
Within seconds, the television screen filled completely with the menacing, angry face of a skinhead. The skinhead wore black sunglasses which completely obscured his eyes, and beneath which a slit mouth was working away angrily, making strange shapes. The head which filled the screen looked like something a child would draw when asked by a teacher to sketch an angry face, except that a child wouldn’t draw it wearing mobster shades. TVM were not transmitting the sound, because they had a voice-over on, but the skinhead was obviously shouting. Was the British National Party holding a meeting in Valletta, shouting about death to Muslims, Pakis and other foreigners?
The camera went to a full body shot and the enraged skinhead was shown gesticulating with his fist, shouting madly and looking as though he wanted to strangle somebody, while a bunch of embarrassed-looking people wearing SHout T-shirts stood behind him. Never has a slogan been more appropriate.
My God, I said, it’s Saviour Balzan. He’s not leading a meeting of the BNP but fronting a press gathering of peace-loving environmentalists, conservationists and people who like cats and dogs but who have decided to extend their sympathy for fluffy things to things with feathers.
Moira Delia, standing next to him, looked as though she wished the ground outside the Law Courts – for that is where they were – would open up, swallow her whole, and take her to the nearest vodka launch party wearing something a little more fetching than an unflattering SHout T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She had my sympathy there. She’s smart enough to have understood that her campaign leader was making a terrible impression. He was one heartbeat away from unzipping his trousers, waggling it around and saying “Daqs dan”.
My heart sank, because I want the ‘No’ vote to win, but at the same time I can see that the ‘No’ campaign is going nowhere. I am sitting here watching Saviour Balzan and some other really badly chosen people (though certainly not all) wade right in there to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s painful to watch, because it could all have been so different.
Let’s hope that, despite the disastrous leadership of the SHout campaign, the ‘No’ vote will still get there just as the ‘Yes’ vote won in the divorce referendum despite Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. So many people I know didn’t vote in that referendum, or voted ‘No’, because they absolutely could not stand him. That’s completely irrational behaviour, but we have to acknowledge that plenty of people will behave that way. Saviour Balzan is nowhere as well known or as widely despised as Pullicino Orlando, but the problem here is that when he does argue his cause publicly, he gets mad, angry, loses his train of thought, is illogical and begins sputtering all over the place. And like Pullicino Orlando, he is completely humourless and that shows in the eyes. It comes across really badly.
I don’t like the way it’s looking at all. I’m really nervous about it. Yet as a case-study in public affairs and public relations, it fascinates me. The hunters started out with a big negative and the environmentalists with a big positive, and now that situation has been reversed. The ‘No’ campaign had the cool ticket, but what do they do? They front it with one of the least cool – in all meanings of the word – people I know.
I can’t ring Saviour Balzan to offer him my professional advice because he’ll only SHOUT unprintable obscenities at me down the line again.
So I’ll give it to him here. He will ignore it, but I hope that the sensible people around him in the campaign will overrule him. What should have been a campaign exclusively about birds and picnicking families has been turned into a campaign exclusively about hunters. You can’t even see the birds. They are nowhere in the campaign. Instead, it’s wall-to-wall hunters and whether they have rights or not.
The ‘Yes’ campaign did this deliberately. I could see that. In a toss-up between ugly guns and pretty birds, the pretty birds are always going to win. So they have wiped the birds right out of the picture. And the No campaign, because they have nobody professional to guide them, didn’t even realise it was happening and why. They actually ran with it, and now even they are talking about hunters too.
They shouldn’t be. They should be talking about birds. And they should be talking about normal people, families with children, who want to enjoy the countryside in spring.
And if that doesn’t happen, the hunters are going to win. And then there’ll be no stopping them.
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