Isn’t there somebody who can take Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando gently to one side and let him know that the only sorts of decisions you should discuss on your very public Facebook wall have to do with what you should feed your hamster and when?
Anything else is dangerous. If you talk about where you’re going tonight or announce that you’re out of the country you’re setting yourself up for burglary. And if you talk about how and why you voted as you did in parliament, then you’re setting yourself up to be dismissed scathingly with the Maltese word ‘ċarlatan’.
Perhaps it’s too late to expect Dr Pullicino Orlando to be a man – ‘gentleman’ would be setting the bar far too high going on what we have seen over the last three years – but it’s not too late to remind him that at his age and in his position he shouldn’t be rushing to Facebook to hint darkly about what the prime minister told him and what he told the prime minister, and how he planned to vote but why he changed his mind and so on and so forth like a kid smoking behind the bicycle shed while embroidering on an altercation with the headmaster to impress his mates with his ‘gatz’.
As one of his constituents, I am perfectly placed to tell Dr Pullicino Orlando to decide once and for all where he stands and what he plans to do. It is to me and to the thousands of others who put him where he is to represent us that he is accountable and to whom he owes explanations of his behaviour. He owes no explanations to the crowds of Laburisti , Labour Party lawyers and Super One hawks, and sharks who clog up his list of Facebook Friends. They just see him as a useful tool and he usefully obliges by messing up his own political career to – wittingly or unwittingly – help further theirs. He gets given one chance after another to restore his reputation to some semblance of credibility and instead of seizing this, he sets a stick of dynamite beneath it and blows it up. If he is taking advice on how to behave from some of the people with whom he is photographed in social situations then I am not surprised that his behaviour has come to be what it is, including the highly inappropriate exchanges on Facebook. As the Maltese chestnut has it, if you spend your time with people who limp, you end up limping yourself.
If Dr Pullicino Orlando is so much at odds with the prime minister, then he has just two behaviourally correct choices before him: to demand the resignation of the prime minister or to resign himself – and by that, I mean resign his seat and not the party whip. The options he seems intent on pursuing – death by a thousand cuts for the prime minister and for his own political career and credibility – are ill-judged, unwise and above all, absolutely dishonourable. He appears to have adopted the behavioural code of a greaseball hick Labour lawyer.
It is significant, I think, that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando wrote on Facebook that he voted with the government because he does not want to disappoint those of us who voted for him, by being ‘used as the excuse to call early elections’. He has disappointed us terribly already and it is far too late for him to start worrying about that. He disappoints us again with his explanation, because we expect him to say that he votes with the government because he supports the government and not because he ‘doesn’t want to be used’. The only people using him are the Labour Party, but apparently, that’s all right with him.
Dr Pullicino Orlando has been in parliament for years. He should know by now that Joseph Muscat’s ‘motion’ was in effect one of no confidence in the prime minister and his government. Had it been carried with his vote, then he knows what the consequences would have been, even if his Facebook Friends do not. Had we who voted for him ended up with a Labour government two years before due date just because of his ego and the need to feed it – at least he is not talking about conscience – then we would have wanted to metaphorically lynch him. But we don’t want him to behave because he is frightened of our reaction. We want him to behave because he knows it is his duty to do so.
Jesmond Mugliett is no better. True, he released a statement to the media rather than nattering on his Facebook wall, but still. He said he voted against Joseph Muscat’s motion because he did not want to destabilise the government and so imperil divorce legislation. The implication is that he would have been more than happy to destabilise the government had there been no divorce bill about to be debated. If these two carry on as they are, their political career is going to end up on the scrap-heap or with the Labour Party, which amounts to the same thing anyway. You blew it, Jeffrey. Again.