Karmenu Vella is supposed to be writing the Labour Party’s electoral programme, but he is clearly at an absolute loss

So Joseph Muscat has had to convene a congress of Laburisti to brainstorm for brilliant policy ideas. Imagine that – government by the masses. It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t Labour masses, but the fact that they’ve always voted Labour, through hell and high water, tells us quite a bit about their thinking skills, which are neither lateral not literal but...well, never mind.

But there’s worse. Il-Guy took to a public podium earlier this week to announce that “our agreement with the European Union can be changed if it no longer serves our purposes”.

What? The Times and Malta Today, which cheerfully report every scratch on a bendy-bus and every yawn on Franco’s blog or Jeffrey’s wall (though they didn’t send a photographer to his ‘wedding of the year’ last Saturday – shame) missed this big story completely.

Jeffrey and Franco will be out of the political picture not after the general election, but weeks before with the dissolution of parliament. But what they think and say seems to be far more noteworthy than what Karmenu Vella is up to, even though Vella is by far the most important figure in the Opposition, more influential even than party leader Joseph Muscat, and will be the most important figure in the Labour government (so help us God).

Vella is supposed to be writing the government’s programme for 2013 to 2018; he will be the most important minister in Prime Minister Joseph’s cabinet; he is by far the most influential figure now; and yet, when he says something like that, the only newspaper which takes note is L-Orizzont. And it takes note for all the wrong reasons, which it thinks are the right ones.

What is most frightening about Il-Guy’s statement about Malta and the European Union is not the way it betrays his still-cherished resentment towards EU membership and the failure of Labour’s goals against it. Nor is it the fact that, more than eight years of membership down the line and with Malta changed so very much for the better – can we even remember life before membership, or how terribly restricting and narrow it was? – Il-Guy remains blockheaded about it.

No, what is most frightening is that Il-Guy’s words betray his consummate failure to understand the nature of EU membership. Malta does not have “an agreement” with the European Union, Mister Guy. It negotiated terms of membership. Malta is an integral part of the European Union.

Countries which have agreements with the European Union must obviously be outside the European Union, like Switzerland (not the abortive one in the Mediterranean) or Morocco. It takes two or more parties to make an agreement. One party cannot make an agreement with itself. Malta is part of the EU so Malta cannot make agreements with the EU. All that business took place before Malta became a member.

If I did not remember Il-Guy so very well as one of Mintoff’s and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s most appalling cabinet ministers, I would say that it is incredible that he does not know this. But given his history, no further evidence of Vella’s lack of intelligence, education and information (his street-fox cunning, used almost exclusively for business deals, should not be mistaken for a high IQ) is going to surprise me.

No, I am not at all surprised that Joseph Muscat’s chief adviser, the one spinning his wheels and pressing his buttons, does not know that an EU member state cannot revise or renegotiate the terms of membership. It can only pull out and cease to be a member.

I trust that this is not what Karmenu Vella has in mind, given that he also said that “EU membership is not the issue”. Joseph the Leader spent quite a few years trying to convince us, through his Super One television show ‘Made in Brussels’ and his column in L-Orizzont, to vote against EU membership because of numerous factors including starvation and death in wars, and then promptly buzzed off to Brussels as a member of the European Parliament. So he really should give Chief Adviser Guy a bit of a crash course. Or perhaps that should be krexx kors.

I am somehow left with the feeling that the next five years of Labour government are going to be like a protracted episode of some depressingly tedious (“trying hard to be amusing”) ZOO performance on Super One, and about as edifying and enjoyable. Give Karmenu Vella a fright wig and Joseph Muscat a pair of fishnet tights, and we’re sorted. Roll on the crassness, vulgarity and worst of all, the sheer, unadulterated stupidity.

* * *

I can believe that Edward de Bono, in a letter published in The Times here in Malta, claimed credit for saving the Olympic Games. That’s utterly typical, and he might well have tried to get the very same letter published in The Times of London, only to have the junior assistant to the letters editor spike it or press delete.

But I can’t believe people actually read that letter and took him seriously. The Times reported it as a separate story – Edward de Bono Claims Credit for Saving the Olympics – and without, as far as I could make out, a trace of irony. And beneath the story, there is a stream of comments about how the greatness of some Maltese does us all proud.

Lateral thinking? Malta is benighted by literal thinking. And you can never think laterally if you can only think literally.