Xarabank was no place for the first televised debate between the Prime Minister and the new leader of the opposition. But there’s no accounting for the choices of politicians and so I made myself a sustaining mug of Bovril and settled down for the rout. It was like pitting a smart-Alec fifth-former against – well, a seasoned prime minister who’s rather more intelligent than most.
There was no way it was ever going to work for the leader of the opposition, but he’s so lacking in self-awareness that there was no way he was going to figure that one out for himself, and his aides – oh dear, his aides – don’t really have that much going on upstairs. To compound the fiasco, he appears to have thought that preparation isn’t necessary when facing down the Prime Minister in front of a sizeable television audience. Having faced no audience more demanding or critical than one composed of Labour delegates, he thought it sufficient to stride onto the set armed with nothing but his wit and eloquence and a couple of photocopies proving that Tony Blair, too, was against the then European Community in 1974. Or was it 1983?
It was an unequal match to start with and it became more and more unequal as it went on. The gulf between them is not just one of age, experience and general comportment. Last Friday’s performance revealed something that many of us had suspected already: the gulf is also intellectual. When Muscat spoke, there was simply nothing there and, what’s worse, he showed himself unable to think on his feet, which is a crippling disadvantage when your opposite number is remarkable for his ability to do just that.
The Prime Minister has shown time and time again, and in the most challenging of situations, that he can stand there wearing an inscrutable expression while listening to a stream of critical remarks and difficult questions, and behind that solemn expression his mind is already 20 paces ahead, collating the answer, which he delivers without a pause. While we on our sofas are thinking: “Oh dear God, how is he going to reply to that, there’s no way he has the details”, or “That’s nailed you; now let’s see you get out of that one” – depending on whether we like him or not – he opens his mouth and all the details come forth, on everything from photovoltaic cells to the precise number of jobs created last month to exactly how many people are being made redundant by any one company you care to mention. And he reasons with his audience and is logical and rational and his opponent is left without a leg to stand on.
It used to infuriate Alfred Sant, and now it’s going to infuriate Joseph Muscat, who at one point exploded, his face contorted with anger: “You tell me that politics is not a toy for me to play with. But then you’re not my teacher and I’m not a schoolboy.” Oh really? Prove it, then. So far, the general report is: “Joseph thinks too highly of himself without justification. He can do better in class but must work harder”.
What’s even more interesting is that the prime minister has got the psychology of the situation down to a tee. A lesser man might be blatantly patronising to the leader of the opposition, might be tempted to make withering remarks, might stand there wearing a sardonic and contemptuous smile – the very sort of smile that Muscat himself tends to wear in that situation (he was wearing one on Friday). But no – the way the Prime Minister handles the Labour leader is just perfect: treating him as his equal, acknowledging his status as the leader of the opposition, referring to him respectfully, but then exposing his shortcomings with such consummate expertise that you just end up hoping one of Muscat’s aides is waiting in the wings with a box of bandages and some antiseptic cream. I call this strategy “devastating a person while being nice to them”. Some women are especially good at it: “That’s a lovely dress – so flattering for the fuller figure.”
It didn’t help Muscat’s chances that he had the rug pulled from beneath him right at the start. The golden rule in debates is to wrong-foot your opponent at the outset, so that unless he is of particularly fine mettle, he fails to recover. So the Prime Minister opened with a profuse apology for not being in the house when the leader of the opposition gave his maiden speech – he was away from the island representing Malta at a high-level meeting, doing important things with important leaders. He didn’t say that. He intimated it.
Then he said that he was meant to be at the Nationalist Party’s General Council that evening, but because he felt he should go on Xarabank to debate with Dr Muscat instead – it being such an important occasion – he asked the party administration to have a big screen put up in the assembly hall at the party headquarters, so that all the party councillors could watch this historic first debate, instead of being forced to miss out by attending to their party council duties instead. Not missing a beat, he turned to Muscat and said: “Do please address the councillors of the Nationalist Party now. They’re all gathered together there at the headquarters and are waiting for you to speak to them.”
There was a frozen moment while Muscat recovered his balance, then another moment when the perplexity passed visibly across his face as it does with all people who find it hard to react instantaneously in unforeseen situations. And then he opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out. There were words, yes, but they had no coherent shape or form and they meant nothing. He didn’t address the PN councillors directly. He didn’t even look at the camera directly. He just blathered until Joe Azzopardi flew in to the rescue. It was his opportunity to shine, and he failed. What did the Prime Minister achieve by setting his opposite number that test of mettle live on television? He proved, in front of a sizeable television audience, that the leader of the opposition can’t think on his feet. He didn’t tell us that the leader of the opposition can’t think on his feet. That would have been yet another worthless opinion. Instead, he gave us a little demonstration, and nailed him.
The leader of the opposition’s lack of prescience in debate allowed the Prime Minister to serve up as a double-whammy what was clearly a blow planned for a later stage in the proceedings, and which he would have been unable to deliver at all, had the Labour leader not given him the perfect opening to do so in the first few minutes – and had he been put through his paces by aides rehearsing every envisaged situation, which he clearly had not. “You say one thing before the election and now you’re saying another,” the Labour leader told the Prime Minister. Even I, wrapped in my crochet hippie blanket with my Bovril and my mind dulled by too much work and too little sleep, could see what was coming next. The Prime Minister, instead of being scathing, burst into laughter: this from the man who campaigned ferociously against EU membership, and who now talks like a born-again Europhile?
That set the tone. From then on, each time the Labour leader quoted the European Union as the ultimate authority, the Prime Minister smiled as though genuinely charmed by developments and told us how pleased he is when he hears his opposite number talk so highly about the EU. He’s so pleased that Dr Muscat now sees the wisdom of EU membership.
From that point on, the Labour leader was on a losing track and there was no way he could recover. Dr Gonzi used to score points off Alfred Sant by pushing the buttons that made him bristle with anger so that he came across as a bad-tempered Luddite with a fixation on corruption and no plans for the country. If last Friday’s performance is anything to go by, he is going to be scoring points off Dr Muscat by pushing the buttons that make him come across as a foolish and empty vessel who just hasn’t got a clue – not because he’s young, miskin, but because he’s not particularly bright.
I’ve left the most important detail for last. If you ask people what struck them most about the entire show, they will not tell you that it was the argument about electricity rates, or the news about a wind-farm. They will not even tell you that it was that symbol of neurotic womanhood who stood up and gave the impression that all women with children take anti-anxiety pills and feed them to their children, who they keep indoors throughout the summer months studying for their examinations.
No, they will tell you that it was the way the Labour leader repeatedly used the Prime Minister’s first name: Lawrence this and Lawrence that. It jarred not just because the only appropriate form of address for the Prime Minister in any forum, except at home with his family or sharing a whisky with friends, is “Prim Ministru” or, at a push, the less formal but still formal “Dr Gonzi”. It jarred most particularly because, throughout the show, the prime minister referred to him as Dr Muscat, and not as Joseph, even when addressing him directly. The message the television audience received – at least, that part of the television audience not born and raised in close proximity to the gutter – is that the Prime Minister knows the correct form (good) but the leader of the opposition does not (bad).
It might have been just plain pig-ignorance that made the Labour leader talk about “Lawrence” to a studio audience and the extended audience in its living-rooms. In that case, a bright person would have picked up the Prime Minister’s lead in calling him Dr Muscat, and would have called him Dr Gonzi in return – just as a bright person at table takes note of which fork others are using when he thinks he has picked up the wrong one himself. To persist in calling the Prime Minister by his first name when the Prime Minister is addressing you in the formal manner is so much the height of clodhopping bad manners that it leaves me quite breathless.
I hope, for the sake of this country, that somebody has at least had the presence of mind to teach the leader of the opposition how to handle his cutlery and how to behave at table, because in my quite extensive experience, those who don’t know how to address others are also strangers to the correct code of behaviour in almost every other social situation. I hope, too, that he hasn’t spent the last four years running around Brussels calling senior leaders Jan and Pieter and Hans on the grounds that they have exchanged a few words and they sometimes called him Joseph. The next thing we know, he will be calling the archbishop Paul and the police commissioner John. It appears that Labour has condemned itself to yet another leader who doesn’t realise that there is far more strength in impeccable manners than there is in uncouth behaviour. He would have raised his own status by addressing the Prime Minister as “Prim Ministru” or even as “Dr Gonzi”, but he doesn’t have the intelligence to work that out.
The Labour leader’s repeated reference to the Prime Minister as Lawrence might have been a deliberate tactic: “Let me bring him down a peg. We’re all equals here.” That, too, demonstrates considerable absence of intelligence. Politeness is a far more formidable weapon in face-to-face situations than uncouthness. Uncouthness undermines the person who is being uncouth. It does not undermine the intended victim, but rather the opposite. Your opponent is more effectively disarmed through perfect manners than through a lack of manners, and the Prime Minister – because he is as sharp as a box of butcher’s knives – knows this. He also knows that the vast majority of those who appreciate the significance of manners and forms of address vote Nationalist, not Labour (I wrote the “vast majority”, not “all”), and that the many thousands of them watching the debate would have been appalled by the Labour leader’s insistence on calling him Lawrence while he was calling him – pointedly – Dr Muscat.
After the Lawrence/Dr Muscat fiasco, what struck people most was the way the Labour leader morphed within minutes into the role of a Super One reporter, a role he held for so many years. It was almost impossible for many of us watching the show not to cast him in that role ourselves. We spent years watching him heckle the Prime Minister – not this one – during televised debates while wearing his Super One hat. It is not at all easy for us to make the mental and visual adjustment necessary to see him as the leader of the opposition debating with the Prime Minister.
His behaviour didn’t help. He heckled. He interrupted. He chided. He bickered. He behaved, in other words, exactly as a Super One reporter does and nothing at all like a leader of the opposition should – with gravitas, intelligence and substance. Forget Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Here we had the leader of the opposition performing as Dr Heckle and Mr Chide. When the television audience was asked to ring in their opinion of which leader has the best vision for Malta, the score stayed more or less constant throughout: 39 per cent for the Labour leader and 61 per cent for the Prime Minister. Nobody can claim that a national television audience – and more to the point, the Xarabank audience – is skewed towards the Nationalist Party. I can’t help but think that, once again, the Labour Party’s leader is going to prove to be its weakest link.