The Opposition Leader was all over the front page of this newspaper yesterday, complaining about the “shameful spin” on his illness. Quite frankly, the only shameful spin was his party’s. When you’re up close to a problem, you can’t see it, and that is what’s happening here. Sant and his sidekick Jason Micallef, former host of a television show about plants, are doing their best to portray themselves as injured maidens. But the only people with whom it’s going to work are those who love them anyway, and the other ones who are so insecure about matters of ‘good taste’ that they err on the side of caution and end up allowing the Labour Party to get away with the unacceptable.
If Sant were to rewind and play, not in the company of Jason-his-delegate-to-dinner-dances but with somebody sharp and politically astute at his side, he would see that the only way the whole thing could have panned out was as a pig’s dinner. Even though this is 2008 and not 1983, the Labour Party still doesn’t understand that you can’t control on your own terms the information that reaches the public; you can only do your best to manage it wisely to limit the damage.
The Labour Party astonishes me time after time because instead of damage limitation, it practises damage creation. This is all because it has not yet made the mental leap from 1983 – when I was around, lest somebody attempt to describe the situation then in rosy terms – to the 21st century. Its attitude remains: “I’ll tell you what I want to tell you when I want to tell it to you.” And God help anybody who steps out of line because the injured maidens come out in force, wailing like a Greek chorus, trying their best to cover up their own inadequacies by accusing other people, who see things as they really are and say so, of “lack of sensitivity”.
Excuse me, but lack of sensitivity to what, exactly? The man is out there, giving press conferences, interviews and writing Prosy Points for the newspapers. He has announced that on Sunday he will give the closing address at the Labour Party’s big conference, when his “policies” for a 10-year Labour government (it doesn’t take that long to run the country into the ground) will be announced. Does he expect to carry on as usual while the rest of us tuck our tails between our legs and keep quiet? Hardly. As for good taste: well, I’m not going to be taking any lessons in taste from a bunch of men in ill-fitting shiny suits and co-respondent shoes who talk about dinner-‘denses’ and ‘bondages’ with mothers. They’d be better of taking some lessons themselves.
Sant’s Labour Party has a very long track record – he celebrates 16 years as party leader round about now, if I remember correctly – of seizing on its own mistakes and shortcomings and, instead of trying to correct them, portraying them as the mistakes and shortcomings of its competition or of those perceived as its enemies. I’m quite sure there is a term for this in Freudian psychology – projection? Yes, I’ve just looked it up: it’s a defence mechanism by which you attribute to others your own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and emotions. It reduces your anxiety by projecting what you find unacceptable about yourself onto others.
It may be subconscious, but it may also be deliberate doublespeak. I think it’s a mix of both. It works for them to a certain extent – it certainly did in 1996 – because there are a lot of people about, who are not vigilant, and who tend not to think too much about things, merely skimming over the surface after some cursory observation. And so this allows Alfred Sant to accuse others of shameful spin and manipulation while insisting in the same interview, in the very next breath, that details of his illness were “never kept under wraps” and that they were made public “according to a planned sequence of events”.
Never kept under wraps? Come off it. We have the press releases, the tapes of the so-called press conferences, and the eyewitness reports of those who were summoned to an audience with the doctors and then not allowed to ask questions. It is even on record that the Labour Party, when announcing that the boss had gone into hospital, testily ordered the nation not to speculate.
Now Alfred Sant wants to have us believe that it was a matter of “all will be revealed in good time” – you know, like the gospels. I can’t speak for others here, but I can certainly speak for myself: what does he think I am, somebody with a pea for a brain? You would have to be either that or completely besotted with him to believe such utter hogwash. It doesn’t even make sense.
When this newspaper’s interviewer mentioned that the Labour Party is being criticised for having hushed up the truth about his medical condition when it first became apparent, Sant “flatly denied” it. This was his unbelievable reply: “This is one of the spins that have been circulating over the last few weeks, which is shameful. The whole thing developed just three days before Christmas. Within three days, there was a diagnosis and a decision to operate. At the time, everybody was in shutdown mode, with politics taking a back seat ... and I had very little time during which to communicate, even with my family. It is totally shameful the way all this has been manipulated by certain people. It was my intention, right from the start, that – once I new what the prognosis was, how the operation had gone, what the follow-up would be, and after consulting with my family and the party – to explain the details. This is precisely what I did at a pre-planned press conference on 14 January, which had actually been scheduled about nine days beforehand. There was absolutely no attempt to keep anything hidden. Everything had to come in its own time. But now I’m used to this kind of manipulation, and this was simply the usual partisan politics from a number of people who should know better. They should have waited to see exactly what the situation was.”
Why? Why should we have waited to see? Because that’s what Fred and Jason decided? I’m sorry, Fred and Jason, but that’s not how things work. You had a perfect blueprint for communicating this information because the country has already been there before: with Fenech Adami’s serious heart operation when he was prime minister. You should have done exactly the same, and then you’d have been home and dry and nobody would have said anything except “I’m sorry for your trouble”, and then promptly shut up.
Sant and Jason now accuse the journalists at The Sunday Times, me and some others of using a different approach to Fenech Adami’s operation. Yes, exactly: because his people were instructed to brief the public in very great detail, as and when things happened, there was nothing left to say or to speculate about, except “sorry for your trouble.”
If the people who pass for strategists down at Labour HQ were to pull out the newspaper cuttings and replay the newsreels, they would see heart specialists Alex Manche and Albert Fenech, sitting in front of the press and volubly replying to any questions, after describing the problem and the solution with a battery of heart diagrams and other graphic aids. There was absolutely no room left for speculation and questions were encouraged.
Sant is not credible when he claims that the Labour Party didn’t give out any information because there wasn’t time for him to communicate with his family. He himself said that the problem cropped up when politics was dead and everyone was in shutdown mode: that gave him lots of time to talk on the telephone. In my family, which is more extensive, all we have to do is tell one person and everyone else knows within seconds. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the excuse that it took three weeks to tell the family, which is why the press conference was ‘scheduled’ for 14 January, by a thrilling and most extraordinary coincidence just hours before a prime-time show on which the subject was to be discussed.
This is what I think: that the original intention was to tell us nothing at all, and to force us to accept this. In the end, it was the Labour Party which was forced to announce some of the details (not all, by any means) after three weeks of speculation.
During that very odd press conference, with surgeons obliged to sit beneath a banner of the Labour Party – one of them might not have minded, given that he plans to stand for election – Sant made an extraordinary reference to “private persons in a public position”.
What might that kind of hybrid creature be? I’m surprised nobody picked it up. You’re either a public person or a private person. There is no such thing as a private person in a public role. Maybe what he meant is that he likes to keep things private – tough, then, that he’s also been trying to become prime minister for the last 16 grinding years.
Whichever way you look at it, the only manipulation and spin in this whole sorry mess has been on the part of the Labour Party, which actually thought it was possible to keep concealed from the public the fact that the leader had cancer and a tumour removed.
I can’t but see this as yet another case illustration of how the political party which is planning to run Malta for the next 10 years can’t even get the simplest thing right or do it straight. Everything ends up as a mad tangle, and they end up looking like bungling amateurs, most usually because that’s what they are. I really want to trust them with the economy when they can’t even manage to handle the public relations around their leader’s stint in hospital.