A person who exercises power or influence without holding elected office is invariably referred to as an eminence grise, and not always in a complimentary way. It was a phrase originally applied to Cardinal Richelieu’s grey-cloaked private secretary, a Capuchin friar who, although he never achieved the rank of Cardinal himself, exercised such huge influence that he was referred to as “His Eminence”, like a Cardinal.
Other eminence grises spring readily to mind. Among the more infamous was Grigori Rasputin, who exercised such a hold over the Tsar and his wife in the run-up to the Russian Revolution, and Marcia Williams, who later became Lady Falkender, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Head of the Political Office in the 1960s and 70s.
What all these people have in common is that they were seen as exercising undue influence on the seat of power without themselves having won or earned it. This is regarded as particularly heinous in a parliamentary democracy, as we like to think that all power rests in our elected representatives – and not in a faceless bureaucrat pulling the strings behind the scene.
Malta’s Permanent Representative to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana (RCC), has been painted by some as operating in this role. He is the eminence grise of Maltese politics who, over the last quarter of a century, has fulfilled this role allegedly to the detriment of good governance and against the national interest. Is this a travesty of the truth, or an accurate picture of the way two Maltese Prime Ministers, Fenech Adami and Gonzi, have operated?
Let me start by declaring an interest. RCC is responsible for persuading me to become Prime Minister Fenech Adami’s Defence Adviser in January 1996, a post I held under him until October that year, and again from October 1998 until the end of my contract in 1999. I continued to serve as Defence Adviser to Prime Minister Alfred Sant throughout his premiership, a post I was proud to fill since my interest in serving Malta was totally non-political. I suspect that RCC regarded my work for the Sant government as a political defection, if not a betrayal, in the blinkered view of partisan politics that exists in Malta. It was none of these, of course, and I continue to serve today as an adviser to this government, as I shall serve in any capacity, if invited to do so, by a future Labour government.
In the time I was at Castille, I got to know RCC well. By 1996, the Nationalists had been in power for nine years. They were well entrenched and were looking forward to a further five years of office, culminating with successful entry to the European Union. RCC was then the “Chief of Staff” to Fenech Adami. But he was clearly much more than this. RCC has a natural controlling personality and his influence and tentacles spread far and wide. He treated the civil service staff who failed to reach the obsessionally high standards he set with utter ruthlessness. Personal secretaries and staff were castigated and fired in rapid succession. Worse, in my eyes – accustomed as I was to the deference shown to Ministers in the United Kingdom – was the way Ministers here, and especially Parliamentary Secretaries, were treated with utter disdain by him. His alleged remark about Franco Debono, now his nemesis, as “bicca deputat” (roughly translated “a mere MP”) rings true.
He was clearly not only the gatekeeper to Prime Minister Fenech Adami, but also his political adviser and sounding board, his media guru and brand manager (I was told that he taught Fenech Adami how to dress properly to look Prime Ministerial and not, as somebody once famously described him, “a village lawyer from Birkirkara”). Everybody at Castille and most members of the Cabinet (Guido de Marco was the exception), including the most senior civil servants, deferred to his judgement.
When the European Union finally agreed that Malta could begin accession negotiations, RCC was the obvious choice to lead them. He brought to the task the full concentration of his formidable organisational skills and his commitment to the cause. There can be little doubt that Malta negotiated terms for entry that were exceptionally good and this must largely be put down to RCC’s mastery of his brief, and his sheer refusal to accept less than the best deal possible for Malta in the circumstances prevailing. (As a mark of RCC’s importance to the Nationalist Party, it is also interesting to note that the Party’s decline can be seen to have coincided with his attention being focused on the EU, leaving the Prime Minister rudderless on the domestic scene).
RCC was the natural choice as Malta’s Permanent Representative to the EU when it joined. In the last eight years, he has performed outstandingly in Brussels where, thanks largely to his efforts, the old cliché about “Malta punching above its weight” could not have been more true. If the Nationalist Party loses the next election, I would be more concerned about the loss of RCC as our man in Brussels than, with the greatest respect, the loss of any of the current raft of ministers. In Maltese terms, while ministers are expendable, RCC’s influence as our Ambassador in Brussels is exceptional. He is virtually irreplaceable – except, of course, that nobody is irreplaceable. It’s just that the person who will replace him will be irremediably inferior.
But it is in the nature of eminence grises that they end up being disliked, both by members of their own side and others. They invariably come to be hated and feared in equal measure. The recent storm in a teacup over the so-called ‘wikileaked’ US reports about Malta’s surreptitious attempts to rejoin the Partnership for Peace is a good example of this.
As Ambassador, RCC would have been directed by Cabinet to explore the avenues for gaining access as an EU member to EU-NATO strategic discussions and rejoining PfP. If there is any criticism to be levelled, it should be at the way the government formally rejoined the day after their narrow election victory, by-passing Parliament on an issue that had previously divided the nation and for which they had no electoral mandate. While I have no doubt that RCC would have played a prominent part in that decision – as would any eminence grise – the decision would have been the Prime Minister’s, in tandem with the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
RCC is not a particularly likeable individual. He does not suffer fools gladly and he does enjoy wielding enormous personal power within the top counsels of the Nationalist Party. But he has served his Party well, and his efforts on behalf of Malta in the EU have been beyond reproach. Malta is in the EU chiefly because of him, and has enjoyed the fruits of membership principally as a result of his dedication, guile, wit, energy, drive and combative spirit. Both Labour and Nationalist parties agree on this score. Let them both therefore acknowledge the source of such benefits to Malta, not damn him for being the Maltese eminence grise par excellence.