The Prime Minister, his now largely invisible chief of staff, and his favourite cabinet minister put up a sordid show over the last few days – more sordid, that is, than usual – showing clear signs of cracking under pressure. The psychological strain was especially evident in the crazy letter which Keith Schembri wrote to the chairman of the European Parliament’s PANA Committee: a ‘sick note’ full of absurdly transparent excuses and crackpot finger-pointing at the journalist he views as being the source of his problems (guess who). Even nuttier was the way he sent a messenger to the European Parliament office in Valletta, at 2pm when the hearing sessions were about to begin, to hand the letter to the chairman in the street as he was about to enter. Werner Langen, the chairman, didn’t mince words when he spoke about this at a press conference afterwards, even though he is German. “He even doubts our mandate,” he said. “This is a scandal.”
Ana Gomes, the deputy chair, was blunt about the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, too. “Mr Schembri is outrageous,” she said, referring to the letter in which he wrote that he would not appear before the committee because he doesn’t think they’re empowered to ask him to. “He is involved in the Panama Papers and he has a lot of explaining to do,” she continued, “and not just to the people in Malta.”
A day earlier, on Sunday morning, his boss Joseph Muscat didn’t seem much calmer. His standard smug demeanour now long gone, he stood before a small gathering at a Labour Party club and, oozing narcissistic pain, flung insults at the Opposition leader. It wasn’t what he said or how he said it, though: it was his face that gave the game away. Red, his eyes like slits, he looked as though he had spent half an hour crying before getting there. There was no composure. He was not on an even keel.
Konrad Mizzi’s bad show wasn’t because he lost his cool. No, it was because he failed to do so. With his boss beginning to break down, Schembri throwing warped hissy fits in writing, and many thousands of people convening in Valletta to demonstrate against them all, Mizzi’s ‘business as usual’ nattering into the microphones suddenly stood out for what it had been all along though we never could really put our finger on it: nuts. Eyes wide and staring, mouth gibbering management-speak nonsense and buzzwords, poorly-accented English words and phrases chucked all over the place like carnival confetti, bare-faced lying (“they confused me with Keith Schembri”; “I never authorised them to go to the banks”): suddenly, what had once looked like naïve credulousness, which the other crafty two found they could usefully manipulate, now looked to us standing out here like a good case-study for a serious personality disorder. I’m beginning to think that far from being a stooge for the Prime Minister and his chief of staff, Mizzi is probably the worst of the lot of them, because it’s becoming increasingly apparent that he is immune to any kind of psychological distress.
It hasn’t been a great start to Malta’s presidency of the EU Council. Those boastful billboards now seem far detached from reality. Yes, there has been plenty of news and media focus on Malta, but it’s not been the kind they dreamed of or wanted. First there was a wall-to-wall media storm for which they have only one of their cabinet ministers, Chris Cardona, to blame. His use of precautionary warrants for vengeful reasons lifted the brothel story out of the island and took it across Europe. European and international organisations for the protection of journalists and media freedom took it up, reported on it, and tweeted it across Europe.
The government thought it would mitigate that by publishing a new Media and Defamation Bill which had been prepared months back and which had been lying around gathering dust. Instead it made matters a great deal worse. Now it had another massive sandstorm of anger to deal with, a demonstration of thousands of people, experts in media law ripping the bill to shreds all over social media and in the newspapers, and what do you know, the European and international media freedoms organisations had something else to report on, share and tweet about.
And in the thick of this, the PANA Committee flew in, creating new stories for the media to report on. Meanwhile, as the other two bend and snap, Konrad Mizzi gibbers and jerks on undeterred, even defiantly saying that he will be standing for election again.