For the next two years, he spoke about a young and dynamic movement – a Moviment Gdid – that would gather together within its peace ‘n’ love fold the various disparate factions that wished to be part of this happy rush towards progressive liberalism.
For those two years, the Labour Party was the party that dared not use its name or its logo, the party forbidden to wave any flags but those of the European Union, which in earlier years its supporters had been accustomed to setting alight.
And then, after two years of discussions and competitions and decisions by committee, Labour finally unveiled – at an exhibition that the leader did not attend because one of his legs was giving him trouble – the new Labour logo: ‘arma gdida ghal partit gdid’.
The Labour Party also applied to the Planning Authority to have a balcony built over the main entrance to its headquarters, so that the leader might in the appropriate manner proclaim victory and receive the adulation of the crowds when he is elected prime minister two years hence. Muscat brought in a chief executive officer on secondment from the beleaguered national airline, who has since not been seen or heard, deleted the post of secretary-general and handed Super One to Jason Micallef as his own personal fiefdom.
And that’s where the change has stopped. It has now become uncomfortably obvious that the 37-year-old, who has spent the best part of his life living off the bank of mum and dad and the spoils of a fireworks chemicals business, who hasn’t worked other than as a Super One and Maltastar propaganda man and then as an MEP for four years, is completely out of his depth at the head of a deeply troublesome political party plagued with heavy baggage, riddled with knives, and liberally strewn with the intellectually and socially challenged.
Muscat is so far out of his depth that he is drowning. The signs are all there – but the bridesmaid press, acting as uncritically as it did with Alfred Sant in the mid-1990s, pretends that it does not see. Every rare move is received with over-egged admiration that is fuelled mainly by hope: if this man is going to be our prime minister, so help us God, then we would prefer to see hope where there may be none, lest we slit our wrists at the thought of the cock-ups yet to come. The press is in a collective state of denial. We don’t want to see the truth because it would make us despair.
The signs have been there for some time. Over the last two-and-a-half years, Muscat has lost his hair, become prematurely bloated and heavy, and yet, instead of fitting in with these blatant signifiers of stress, his facial expression has become emptier and shallower. His withdrawal from public duties for most of the summer months should also have been a cause for concern. But it wasn’t, not even when his wife began to appear in his stead.
The first alarm bells began to ring for reporters and commentators rather late in the day, when Muscat made his first statement about the stirrings of democracy among our North African neighbours and fell flat on his face. The scale of events clearly had escaped him completely. It was as though, in the midst of the chaos and jubilation surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall, Malta’s opposition leader had suggested that the government ‘unleash a massive marketing campaign’ to bring to Valletta those tourists who were too afraid to go to Prague.
Nothing Muscat had done or said before that had raised questions about his intellectual strength. But his tourism statement has done just that. His inability to see what was wrong with it – he said through a spokesman that he had a good laugh about the fuss – only raises more questions, rather than assuaging our concerns. Previous bad behaviour, such as rejecting an invitation to a formal banquet and going to Sicily with Anglu Farrugia instead, being rude about the food by saying that he would prefer a hamburger, leaving the prime minister waiting in a studio for half an hour and turning up late to a meeting with the King of Spain, were seen as little more than evidence of appalling manners, and not a reflection on his intellectual strength. Now we have reason to doubt that intellectual strength.
Almost three years into his leadership of the party, Joseph Muscat has yet to tell us what that party stands for. The fine talk about grand coalitions and new movements of liberals, progressives, homosexuals and separated people who want a divorce has fallen by the wayside. He has backtracked and sidetracked on divorce, there is no mention of homosexuals any more lest old ladies are scared off and cease to fawn on Silvio Parnis, and the Labour Business Forum is a joke led by a criminal lawyer and a man being prosecuted for attempted murder. Muscat bought Marisa Micallef’s scalp at a high price and then realised too late that by turning her into a mercenary he had negated the very same influence he sought to buy. So even that was a bad step and a waste of time and money.
As to what Labour stands for under Joseph Muscat, we are no wiser now than we were when he was elected. We are, in fact, more confused. He sends his supporters out into the streets waving EU flags as a sign of his commitment to EU membership, but when he announced his shadow cabinet last week, he chose George Vella for shadow foreign affairs minister, a man more forcefully and rabidly against EU membership than Sant himself.
For almost three years, Muscat has done nothing about an electoral programme that might tells us where the party stands. Now that he has finally decided to start doing something about it in a panic as the months tick by, the man he chooses for that purpose is not some thrusting new figure without baggage and with a fresh approach to the future. It is Karmenu Vella, remembered by those of my generation as a cabinet minister in the oppressive regimes of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. And he has named him shadow finance minister.
The rest of his shadow cabinet is no less dispiriting. Muscat’s big plans for a movement that represents the aspirations of new generations of Maltese have come to this: a line-up of relics from the General Workers Union, Lorry Pullicino’s police force, and the cabinets and backbenches of Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant. The new faces, such as they are, amount to little more than the likes of Silvio Parnis, a man who trades in favours, as evidenced during a parliamentary question only this week, and who posts photographs of himself modelling – yes, modelling – on social networking sites such as Hi5.
Muscat may be completely out of his depth, but he is probably not unduly concerned. He knows that it is possible to win a general election without knowing exactly what you’re doing, plan to do or how to do it, because he was right there with Alfred Sant when Sant did the exact same thing. He now hopes that what he thinks is Karmenu Vella’s expert touch from the governments of the 1970s and 1980s will pull him through what comes after the victory. That’s because his grandmother convinced him that life under Mintoff, when Vella was a cabinet minister, was great. And so Karmenu Vella, who was in government in 1981, will be writing the programme to shape Malta’s future in 2013.
Will the last one out pull down the blinds.
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