I just cannot forget the humiliating speech made by Lawrence Gonzi last Monday on the vote of confidence motion.

Here was a party leader who for once could not say what he really wanted to say: he had to keep away from the topic that must have caused him sleepless nights over the past months. He could not touch the Franco Debono walking landmine for fear any slight touch could lead it to explode.

So he was forced – yes, that is the word, forced – to attack the Opposition with gusto. Which he did. But his heart was not in it. All he wanted to do, I could feel his whole being telling him, was to give that Franco a good hiding.

In all the Carm Mifsud Bonnici debate and the vote of confidence debate, few from the government side had mentioned Franco except for some backbenchers like Edwin Vassallo and Charlo Bonnici.

They much preferred turning Franco into a non-person, much in Orwellian mode, than tackling him head on. If they discussed the issue among themselves, they spoke in terms of ‘traitors’, ‘political suicide’ and the like. They roundly proclaimed loyalty as the supreme virtue on the government side, as if loyalty could make up for other missing virtues. This, after all, is a government that thrives on loyalty and rewards it.

So, since Franco was ‘disloyal’, all that he said had to be discounted. And then he had made common cause with the Opposition and thus brought down a minister – it stands to reason, so argue the PN stalwarts, that whatever he says is wrong and bad.

Thus, in the black and white show that is Malta’s political arena, all that CMB was and did had to be defended as if it were the ultimate truth. He was the victim of Franco’s ‘treachery’ and hence must be defended against anyone and anything.

Now this might make for good confrontational politics: never admit anything, never blink, and push back with all your force. But it hardly makes for commonsense politics.

The truth is, as I will attempt to show, that there was a lot in what Franco Debono said that was true but equally that he was the last person who should have said them. And coming from him, all that he said was immediately devalued. In the end, he did no good to the causes he defended: on the contrary, he did them a lot of harm, much though he may try to console himself that at least something was changed after he threw down the gauntlet.

True, there is a lot that is not functioning as it should in the fields of justice and law and order. The courts remain in a state of confusion and chaos which no minister, no government, seems able to tackle and improve. Despite increasing and doubling the number of magistrates, despite creating so many tribunals and so on, there is still that incredible confusion that anyone who goes to Court has to face.

There is so much to do as well with regard to the Police Force. It must be stated clearly that the people still do not get from the police they meet in their ordinary lives that prompt, efficient and courteous service they have grown to be accustomed to in many other areas of life.

But Franco Debono was the last person who should have spoken on these subjects. Being a lawyer who practices mostly in the Criminal Court (and not ‘a criminal lawyer’ as some media tended to describe him), he should have been far more prudent in his declarations.

This holds not just for him but for all the lawyer-MPs who tend to slip from one hat to the other whenever they speak in the House, whereas they should make a clear distinction between their professional lives and hence their acting as lawyers in the courts, and their duties as MPs.

Many times we hear lawyer-MPs refer blithely to cases they are appearing in and trying to get from the House the backing they may not have obtained in the Courts. We also hear architect-MPs complain about Mepa when they would be referring to their own applications, but there are far more lawyers than architects on the parliamentary benches.

And when they next appear before a member of the judiciary after they had spoken in the House on this or that point of law, how can the lawyer on the other side, and his or her client, be assured that it is still a level playing field where everyone is equal before the law?

Ditto as regards the Police Force. When Franco Debono marches into Police HQ on behalf of a client, he does that as a private lawyer, not as an MP. But inevitably, his speeches and his defiant stance, with regard to the government he is part of, have given him incredible cachet among the people and in a short time he has become everybody’s tribune, the man before whom all the flunkeys quake.

On these issues specifically, while Franco in his last speech before Monday’s vote, claimed that money, jobs and the economy were not as important as the issues he chose to promote, all the empirical evidence around us shows us the contrary. Any survey of public opinion in the past months have shown that justice and law and order were down in the list of public priorities, and jobs, standard of living (along with education and health) were the top priorities.

For Franco to turn this upside down shows me that here is a politician wannabe that does not care what the people feel and want, but only and exclusively what he wants them to think and want. Too bad about the economy, jobs, and health and education. Maybe next time. If politicians were like him, the people will never get what they really want, and will get what they have not asked for and maybe do not need.

Politics is the art of the possible, and it depends on persuasion. What this country got with Franco Debono was a shotgun aimed at the head of the government: give me this (or that, or the other) or else I vote with the eager Opposition and bring a minister or two (and it could have been as easily as the government) down.

It was all about bringing about a government by diktat, a government held to ransom. This is what Lawrence Gonzi surely had on his mind last Monday but which he had to repress deep inside him so as not to make Franco Debono vote against the government and bring it to a premature end.

I am, expressly, not going into so many other areas: whether he had personal political ambitions or not, whether he had personal agendas against this or that minister or not, and even the more vexed question whether there was a reverse osmosis between his court cases and his speeches in the House. Whatever might have lain at the back of his mind in his various initiatives, I am going solely by his public speeches.

Two more points, though I could go on and on.

Much of the criticism he levelled against CMB regarded the legislative functions of the minister. On some cases he may have been right. Now he has (unwisely) been made chairman of the committee for the codification of laws and lo and behold we now get to know that the next meetings of this committee are going to be about another of his pet subjects: how the laws regarding libel cases can be made tougher (and consequently how the freedom of the press may be further curtailed, as one interpretation could have it). May we ask how come this has now become a priority?

Secondly, the situation at the prison is hardly ideal – what with the widespread drug abuse that seems to go on and the notorious Bickle case. The Opposition speakers wisely made much of CMB’s handling of the situation (though there had been other ministers before him when the situation was as bad). Again, the issue concerning Franco Debono regards his profession as a lawyer practising in the criminal court and one must thus ask what his real agendas are when he speaks about the situation in prison with regard to his clients who have ended up there.

At the end of it all, Franco’s real worth for the country as a whole is not what he thinks his worth is, but rather in that it serves as a textbook example how politics should not be done, how a politician should not go about his task, and how a politician who really wants to be one should not use the particular situation he finds himself in (his being the one-seat majority of a government) to blackmail that government into doing what he wants it to do.

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