The prime minister and his communications team – or as they would doubtless put it, ‘tim’ – must have been thoroughly delighted with their kitchen-sink-drama cum Enya music video New Year message. What a massive hit, they must have thought. People will love it. It has all the qualities of those fabulous ded-jien-ha-nivvota-Labour-le-ta-I’m-not-sorry/Malta Taghna Lkoll general election campaign videos that really got people going.

Except that there’s just one catch, and quite a big one, too. We’re not in the thick of a general election campaign. There’s another catch, almost as big: the Labour Party is no longer fighting the government. It is the government. Dictator Gonzi and the Evil Clique are but a distant dream. Now it’s looking more like Puppet Dictator Muscat and his gang of robber barons (and 540 positions of trust) even after less than three years. People have more time to think and, as always, what they are interested in thinking about, more than the Opposition, is the government.

The Labour Party’s general election campaign was packed with individuals testifying for Muscat while claiming to be something they were patently not, like ex Nationalists when they had been raised as rabid Mintoffians, for instance, or like important businessmen when they were shady characters chased by creditors. Or like teachers, when they were part-time TEFL instructors with psychological problems. Muscat’s various public manifestations before the general election were packed with people pretending to be something other than they were, but when this was pointed out, nobody wanted to listen. The noise of campaigning and the hysteria of the calls for ‘change’ drowned out facts, information and common sense.

If the Prime Minister’s New Year message had been a general election campaign video in 2013, and I had written that hey, actually that’s not an ordinary working-class couple Muscat is visiting, but Fernando Tal-Hawsla, whose mother owns Malta’s largest furniture company and whose grandfather is a brother to scandal-ridden 1980s thug and present-day land developer, Piju Camilleri, I would have been pooh-poohed out of town and dissed as negative. And the important, telling information would have been ignored or brushed aside as irrelevant.

But fast forward three years and the story has captured the imagination not just of readers but of the press itself. After I revealed that the Prime Minister had delivered his New Year’s message from Fernando Tal-Hawsla’s kitchen, and that he made his address to the nation over coffee with Piju ‘Tal-Hawsla’ Camilleri’s great-nephew, and that the kitchen itself was made by Construct Furniture, a large operation owned by Bridget Tal-Hawsla, Fernando’s mother, and that the house which the prime minister visited was not bought with the wages of an ordinary hardworking couple but with family money, the newspapers researched further and came up with other good stories. Times of Malta revealed that Fernando ‘Tal-Hawsla’ Agius had actually bought that house under Gonzi’s government in 2008. So much for buying it thanks to Muscat’s fantastic tax policies, then. And that, of course, meant that both Fernando Tal-Hawsla and – much, much worse – the Prime Minister lied through their teeth to the public by saying that he benefited from Muscat’s tax policies for first-time buyers, which were introduced in 2014. They also lied through omission about how it was bought. Eight years ago, Fernando Agius would have been 21 or so (his grandfather Tal-Hawsla died last year aged 71 – do the maths) and there is no way on earth he would have been able to buy that place without his mother paying for it. This gives you some idea of why the Prime Minister, his face glowing with interest as he spoke to him, clearly had such a fellow feeling for that chap. He, too, had his home – the one in which he lives now - bought and paid for by his father (because, in his case, it was his father who had the money) when he was 22.

Meanwhile, The Malta Independent rang Construct Furniture and showed interest in buying a kitchen like Tal-Hawsla’s (“like the one in which the Prime Minister gave his New Year message”). Ah, that’s not yet in production, the sales manager told them. That’s a unique kitchen. It will be available eventually, but not for some time, though we may, perhaps, find a way of making one available by September if you’re lucky.

So the ordinary working-class couple in their mittilkless kitchen turn out to be a financially and politically privileged couple in a unique kitchen made for them by mummy’s furniture company, in a house paid for by Tal-Hawsla money. The kitchen is so special that nobody else can have one like it. It is a Taghna Biss kitchen.

The first question we have to ask ourselves in this situation is: why would the Prime Minister want to lie to the electorate? The only possible answer is that he really gets a power-kick out of getting away with it, seeing how far he can go. He’s got away with so much so far, and it has invariably paid off to his massive advantage. He obviously thinks he can carry on this way despite the context having changed dramatically. It can’t have been impossible for the Labour government to find a real working-class couple who had really bought their own home under the tax benefits scheme, for that little scene. And if they couldn’t, they should have written the scene out altogether. It’s not as though it was necessary, appropriate or even a good idea.

The second question we have to ask ourselves is: if the Prime Minister wanted to lie to the public, why didn’t he do himself a favour and find a young man who isn’t extremely well off, whose mother doesn’t own Construct Furniture, and who isn’t Piju l-Hawsla’s great-nephew? Some commentators have suggested that it’s because his communications skills, honed in constant opposition to the government, are slipping now that he is the government. Some very naïve commentators have suggested that the Prime Minister didn’t know who Fernando Tal-Hawsla actually is (yes, right…). But I think the real answer to this second question is simply an extension to the first: if you get a thrill out of lying to the public, then the bigger and more audacious the lie, the bigger the thrill. The Prime Minister will have known exactly in whose kitchen he was standing to deliver his New Year message – he would have had to know, and he would have made it his business to know and to be involved in the decision – and it would have given him a delicious thrill to know that he was passing off Fernando Tal-Hawsla, Piju Camilleri’s great-nephew, as an ordinary chap who had worked like a dog to buy his kitchen and his home thanks to Labour’s tax benefits.

This is nothing new. It is a clear behavioural pattern of Muscat’s. Only in this case it backfired, and backfired badly. He pushed that envelope too far.

 

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