I have been checking the news to see whether Franco Debono has done the honourable thing and handed in his resignation as the Prime Minister’s parliamentary assistant.
I have not been disappointed. The man is still there, expecting to carry on serving in that capacity, carry on collecting his extra remuneration while doing nothing to earn it, or waiting for the Prime Minister to sack him so that he can justify – to his narcissistic soul at least – kicking up another ruckus in Parliament when the budget allocation for the justice ministry is put to the vote. Because it is now an open secret: Franco Debono wants Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici’s job. He wants to be minister of justice.
It goes without saying that the Honourable Franco Debono has not held himself to the high standards he lays down for others. He has not done the decent thing and resigned after his vulgar and totally unnecessary personal tirade against his boss, who was sitting directly in front of him in Parliament on Friday. Perhaps he will do so this week, but let’s not hold our breath or we shall need to be resuscitated.
Debono was supposed to speak about the buses and present cogent arguments as to why a Cabinet minister should resign. Instead he begged or borrowed 50 minutes of the Opposition’s speaking-time for a ranting-and-venting session that was more appropriate for a psychologist’s consulting room (“Tell me why you think you suffered at the hands of the Prime Minister and Lou Bondì, Franco... here are some tissues.”) than for Parliament, with practically the entire country tuning in to listen to him unburden himself. His voice “quivered with emotion”, The Times said. Emotion? I think it was the excitement of being in the limelight with the whole of Parliament held hostage.
And then, of course, he had to wrap things up by running down his boss, who was seated directly in front of him, to great applause by Anglu Farrugia and other assorted and inept scum in what should be, to him, the enemy trenches. But like damned fools throughout history, he spies enemies in his own trenches and reaches out instead to grab at the flying gifts from the enemy, discovering only too late that they are grenades.
In Debono’s curious world view – perhaps they do things differently in Hal Ghaxaq – you can publicly insult and denigrate your boss as the entire country listens, then blithely carry on working as his parliamentary assistant ghax m’ghandux x’jaqsam.
I expect nothing less from somebody who spent an hour on the telephone trying to convince me why he was perfectly justified in taking on Cyrus Engerer as a client when it meant he would have to conceal the facts of his prosecution from his party leader and Prime Minister, for whom he was supposed to be working as a parliamentary assistant. “Jien irrid niekol ukoll,” he said. Well, if so it’s not because he’s got a wife and six children to support or a household to run, because at the age of almost 40 he still lives with his parents and goes out on dates with his long-suffering girlfriend, but let’s not go there because some people might say li m’ghandux x’jaqsam, even though I think it does, and plenty.
Oh yes, Franco Debono should have resigned a long time before now, but he didn’t and he’s not going to do so any time soon because the world owes him a living and he owes the world nothing ghax miskin kemm baghta, u hadd ma baghta bhalu, jahasra.
Exactly what did Franco Debono gain for himself or anyone else by creating that build-up of tension and then abstaining from the vote? To abstain is to sit on the fence, and those who sit on the fence, as I like to say, end up with a fence-post up their nether regions. He has gained nothing and pretty much lost everything, including the all-important trust of his political peers and his constituents. Vallapena, eh? It was really worth voting Louis Galea out to let in this crock of wotsit instead. I can’t see them doing it again, just like round my neck of the woods we’re not going to be tripping over ourselves to vote for Pullicino Orlando. And Debono hasn’t even won the respect of the Opposition, not that the Opposition’s respect is worth tuppence, because he failed to give them what they want and vote in favour of their motion.
By painting himself with such fabulous intelligence into this tight little Alfred-Sant-like corner, Debono has earned for himself the contempt of both sides of the House. Facebook is teeming with comments from Labour supporters calling him a desperate and directionless individual who lacked the wherewithal to go all the way (translated from the sub-literate), and from those who support his own party and who would like to see Debono put in the stocks and pilloried for all the pointless trouble he’s caused.
The most frightening thing about Franco Debono right now is that, like others with the selfsame psychological flaws, he has absolutely no sense of perspective. His needs and desires loom larger than anything else. His problems are the country’s problems. If he’s got a beef with the transport minister, the transport minister’s personal assistant or the justice minister, then that beef must perforce eclipse the eurozone crisis and the need for everyone to pull together and do what they can to avert as much as they can of the inevitable fall-out for Malta.
While the world – yes, the world, because stocks and shares plummeted internationally at the imminent threat to the euro – held its breath as the Greek parliament took a vote of confidence in the government, back home on the Valletta ranch our own Parliament was forced into the incredibly surreal position of having to discuss the all-important Franco Debono and his feelings of pain, suffering and being hard done by.
It wasn’t even about Austin Gatt, was it. It was All About Franco. The euro was a hair’s breadth away from collapse, the Greek vote went through with a razor-thin majority, and here we were in Malta, talking about godforsaken buses and Jahasra Poor Franco’s emotions. His behaviour verges on the criminally irresponsible, plummeting to the level of the Opposition’s, which acts and speaks as though there is no world outside Malta.
To quote a report by the Press Association, “a week of unending drama in Athens has horrified the indebted country’s European partners, spooked the markets and overshadowed the Group of 20 summit in Cannes. (...) The threat of a Greek default or exit from the euro worsened a European debt crisis that has already forced massive bailout deals for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.”
And in one of those European partner nations, the Prime Minister was taken up with other important business: coping with a spoiled brat throwing a shrieking hissy-fit at the supermarket check-out counter because he wasn’t allowed to have two Mars bars and this made him suffer most horribly. If I were Franco Debono’s mother, I would have given him a good slap a long time ago, but he’s clearly had a lifetime of being told that the world revolves around him, when the people who turn out well are repeatedly reminded of the precise opposite.
A British expatriate friend emailed me on Friday. “I am lost for words,” he wrote. “It is like the outside world doesn’t exist for Malta. First Libya, and now the EU is crumbling and nobody seems to care. I don’t remember having one conversation about Libya with a Maltese person. When will people wake up?” I’ll bet he isn’t having many conversations about the EU either, given that all people seem to want to talk about is buses, even if they haven’t ridden one since they were at school.
You know what? Franco Debono Syndrome is a lot more widespread than we think.
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