Last week, I wrote that this week’s column would be about presidential pardons and the prerogative of mercy – but I forgot to add that I would like to hear your views first. So I’m leaving that to next week, and meanwhile please email me at [email protected].

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The discussion should continue about something else: the way that some MPs are compromised by their money-earning activities outside Parliament. When I dared to suggest that lawyer-MPs should not take on certain cases because it left their integrity severely compromised, the president of the Chamber of Advocates rushed out in their defence, arguing that they have the right to practise their profession. I was assailed by a hundred and one lawyers, even those who are not MPs, each arguing in much the same vein. Strangely enough, nobody who is not a lawyer saw it the way they do. People who are not lawyers can see why, for example, a lawyer-MP should not defend a person who is being charged with organising a scam to defraud the State of invalidity pensions. They can see why it looks bad, and they can see too that, with a zillion lawyers touting for work in Valletta, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that the reason these crooks go to lawyer-MPs is precisely because they are MPs.

But anyway, I’ve been through all that already. What struck me most is the way that the lawyers’ association behaved as though I had said something both outrageous and outrageously ignorant. The reaction was as though Malta should be some kind of little insulated bubble in which MPs must not be subject to discussion or public scrutiny of the conflict between their public and private roles. It might happen everywhere else, in primitive countries like Sweden – but Malta? Forget it – we’re way ahead of those backward hillbillies. We know how to do things, and they don’t.

Ah yes, but here’s the thing. It isn’t only squeaky-clean Sweden where these things are being talked about and dealt with – sorry, have long since been talked about and dealt with. Portugal has a track record for corruption, patronage and toleration of conflict of interest that more than rivals Malta’s. And guess what? In Portugal it wasn’t a columnist who suggested that perhaps lawyer-MPs should stop defending menaces to society, only to be jumped on by the lawyers’ association. It was the president of the lawyers’ association himself – as far back as 1993 – who demanded a complete ban on accumulation between the parliamentary mandate and the exercise of advocacy. He had correctly recognised – something that Malta’s Chamber of Advocates fails to do – that his association’s role was to preserve the integrity of the profession, and to ensure that it is not exposed to public denigration through the compromised behaviour of some of its members. The Maltese Chamber of Advocates believes that this is best done by trying to shout down criticism from a self-exalted pedestal. It does not have the intelligence to see that far more damage is being done by the behaviour of some lawyers than by any number of critical newspaper columns.

Julio de Castro Caldas’ call for reform, a full 14 years ago, immediately triggered an outcry from 38 Portuguese lawyer-MPs, who threatened to vote against any such proposal. This brings me back to another point I had made, that any such reform would be impossible in Malta because it would have to go through Parliament and there are a disproportionate number of lawyers on our parliamentary benches. In protecting their own interests, they would make a formidable lobby group, and probably do so already. Those who backed de Castro Caldas’ proposal claimed that the reform would dignify the parliamentary mandate. They said that an MP couldn’t serve both gods –the interests of the electorate and the interests of their clients. The reform was sabotaged when the vast majority of MPs, lawyers and not, fought back, saying that preventing lawyer-MPs from practising as lawyers would be the first step to the undesirable creation of a class of people who were MPs and nothing else. Really, what they feared was that this would be thin end of the wedge: first the lawyers, perhaps, and then the doctors, architects and shop assistants.

The Portuguese lawyer-MPs argued, not surprisingly, that the very real problem of trafficking in influence, which is the very same problem we are dealing with in Malta, concerned other MPs who were not necessarily lawyers. They avoided entirely the discussion on whether it might be considered unacceptable, by the electorate, for a lawyer-MP to defend a heroin trafficker and help him avoid conviction.

The lawyer-MP controversy was just part and parcel of a much wider debate on reform to the statute of MPs in Portugal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Portugal now has much stricter rules than Malta does as to what MPs may and may not do, but the situation is still considered a difficult one because the public is complacent, toleration of (which is not the same as indifference to) corruption and conflict of interests is high, and the media are reluctant to go out with their magnifying-glasses and find out. The need for State-imposed rules is actually a result of public complacency and poor media scrutiny.

Now compare Portugal’s situation, where the State has to impose rules because the public is too tolerant and the newspapers are too weak, with Britain’s. There is no need there for the State to make a list of specific rules as to what MPs may or may not do, with attendant sanctions, because the print and broadcast media do a highly effective policing job. Every business deal of Cherie Blair’s has for the past five years been subjected to intense media scrutiny – and she wasn’t even an elected representative of the people, but the wife of the Prime Minister. Like the famous dictum about Julius Caesar’s second wife Pompeia, she had to be seen to be above suspicion – but she was not.

In Britain – quite unsurprisingly, as we are speaking here of the world’s oldest democracy, with the longest history of civil engagement by ordinary people – the court of public opinion acts to impose standards on MPs far more effectively than State-imposed regulation. A British MP is more afraid of seeing himself splashed over the newspapers day after day after day than he is of receiving a rap on the knuckles from the prime minister or even the police. The British system of self-regulation works well only because the guillotine of savage public exposure hangs over the head of every MP.

In Portugal, public opinion and the media play no role in monitoring conflicts of interest among MPs and in Parliament. This means that no amount of regulation which seeks to govern MPs’ behaviour is ever going to work properly – because the only thing that MPs are scared of is being pilloried or exposed in the media and not being elected again, which means loss of privileges. The Opposition cannot even be relied on to do some policing because pots will rarely expose kettles. This situation is very close to what Malta’s was up to just a few years ago, but now it is starting to change and that is why they’re jumping about with nerves. For every government MP who is thrown to the dogs by the Opposition, you can rest assured that there are several others who have escaped the same fate – not because the Opposition is unaware of what is going on, but because of camel-trading and trafficking in influence. You can see the inherent danger here even before I point it out to you: that when a member of the Opposition has something on a member of the government benches, the latter is in the former’s power, and must ingratiate himself to survive. The potential for blackmail, back-scratching and trafficking in influence is really quite great.

Malta is beginning to change because the newspapers are starting to peel off their kid gloves, though only ever so slowly. The reason why all these MPs and the lawyers’ union are hopping around as though bitten by fleas is because they are not used to it. They are used to doing whatever they want to do without being criticised or exposed to public scrutiny. The harsh glare of exposure is not something they are accustomed to, and it has taken them by surprise. Yet it is the only thing that will knock them into line. Do you imagine that Jesmond Mugliett will ever do what he did again? No, and it’s not because he got a dressing-down from his boss or even because the government is going to legislate in favour of a draconian code of behaviour for government ministers (it isn’t). Jesmond Mugliett won’t be repeating his stupid actions any time soon because of the flaying he got from the newspapers, which in turn translated into a flaying from the electorate.

There can be no democracy without newspapers that do not police the political class. We saw that in our own time in the 1970s and 1980s, when government ministers and their henchmen rode Malta on a wave of thuggery and corruption, while the front pages of our main newspapers reported the blessing of a basilica in Africa by the Pope, or the fact that a corgi bit the Queen’s toe. I remember holding up the newspaper once and telling a friend, “Oh look, Queen Bitten By Corgi.” “Yes,” he said, “Maybe it’s code for Man Beaten To Pulp By Police Commissioner.” The only way we found out what was going on was through the bushfire telegraph.

Had we then the newspapers and the attitude we have today, most of what happened would have been impossible. But we were very backward, and we have started to clamber out of it now. The most important function of a newspaper is to remind politicians that the power does not rest with them, but with the people who vote for them. Equally, lawyer-MPs who take up the cases of social services fraudsters, drug traffickers and corrupt public officials can get the Chamber of Advocates to protest on their behalf as much as they like. At the end of the day, they are not answerable to the Chamber of Advocates, and it is not the Chamber of Advocates who will vote them in or out.