If there is a perception among certain Nationalist politicians that key segments of the electorate identify with Franco Debono and view him as a proxy for their own irritations, they are mistaken. That might have been so at the start of the year, when Debono was perceived as the ultimate contradiction in terms: a crackpot who spoke sense. It is no longer so.

Even those who are slowest on the uptake have suffered the slow-dawning realisation of what Franco Debono really is, and they don’t think it’s pretty. Back then at the start of the year, I continuously heard the view, repeated like a mantra, that Debono “makes good points” but that he goes about making them the wrong way. By then I had long since got the measure of him and had absolutely no interest in his points, whether they were good or otherwise, because as most of us understand, the medium is the message. If Noel Arrigo writes a disquisition on corruption, I’m hardly going to take it seriously, even if the points he makes are adequate and I would consider them if they were made by somebody credible. The trouble with the Franco Debono story is that people have had a delayed reaction in working out the true nature of the medium while they took the message seriously.

Now that they fully understand what Debono is and what he is after, they are not even bothering with what he says, with whether those points are good, relevant, indifferent or just plain nasty and vile. He has been the object of contempt for people like me for some time now, but to a certain extent we don’t count because we’re the ones who observe these things closely, either because we have to (because we write newspaper columns about them, or other such work) or because we want to. This view has now percolated into the wider sphere as more and more people have picked up the raging clues that here we are not dealing simply with Mr Hurt and Angry Who Speaks for the Nationalist Wounded. I won’t say what people have finally noticed we are dealing with because my editor will probably knock it out, but it doesn’t take much imagination and you almost certainly feel that way about him yourself.

The real clue to how far Debono’s stock has fallen in the public eye is the unabashed and open mockery of him. When widespread mockery enters the equation, what it means is that the person is effectively finished. Criticism, even harsh and vicious criticism, remains a form of acknowledgement that the person is still a player, still retains his credibility. But when mockery walks through the door, it’s time to bow out.

Ironically, it is the Labour Party that hastened Franco Debono’s arrival at the point where he is no longer a perverse hero but a figure of fun. Labour has sought to profit from his terrible behaviour and his warped thinking, and profit it has done in a major way, but it has also experienced diminishing returns on its investment. By exposing him repeatedly to public scrutiny on its television station (something the Nationalist Party obviously did not do), Labour gave people an opportunity they would not have had otherwise, of observing him minutely. Cumulatively, though not at first, the picture has been unedifying.

We have now reached the stage where even the tenor Joseph Calleja, in his acceptance speech when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malta the day before yesterday, cracked a joke mocking Debono. “I almost missed getting this degree,” he said, “because I couldn’t find a copy of my Form II report.” There were a few brief seconds of nonplussed silence as the audience, caught unawares, wondered whether they were allowed to laugh. Then they did.

Nobody thinks of Franco Debono, anymore, as a proxy for his or her own frustrations and negative thoughts. They do not think of him any longer as their special agent for change. The only people left who still think of him as an altruistic individual pursuing some common goal are those who share his psychology, and fortunately for the rest of us there are not that many of them around. We have reached the stage – at long last – where people don’t want to be associated with Franco Debono or his messages or his good points or his urges for change as he sees fit, any longer. He is an embarrassment, and being thought of as sharing his views or associating with him is an embarrassment too. I’ll put it briefly: when people realise that an individual is perhaps one sandwich short of a picnic, they not only discount and disregard his views, but they begin to worry in their own minds that if they share his views then perhaps they are one sandwich short of a picnic too. And nobody wants to have that sort of worry about himself or herself. So they begin to reassess and reconsider those views. That’s when the jokes set in. It is a distancing mechanism.

Even the most disgruntled of PN supporters now regards Franco Debono with contempt and ridicule. The most basic knowledge of human nature in any but the most superficial sense would tell you why this is. People become enraged at a deep level when they feel they have been betrayed or let down. To a great extent, that is the problem the Nationalist Party is dealing with now: many of its supporters feel let down because the ace machine that delivered them from Labour, took them into the European Union and always made the right decisions and the smartest moves is now tripping up over its own feet and making one mistake after another. And it is human nature to round on the object of trust that let you down, even if you are not going to help yourself by doing so.

With Franco Debono, it is the same thing, though the trust and faith placed in him by numbers of people was misjudged at the outset. They saw him as their catalyst, their agent, their proxy. Now they realise that their tin-pot god’s feet are made of dung, they have rounded on him with contemptuous jokes, with ridicule, with the desire to see him gone even if it means that he will take the government with him. That’s how much Franco Debono is hated. People are prepared to throw out the baby with the bath water, to lose the Nationalist government so as to lose him more quickly, because they really cannot stand to see him in the news anymore or to have the country held hostage to his tantrums. Debono is hated because of the damage he has done and continues to do, but tragically, a great deal of this negative feeling has rubbed off by extension on the government which has had to contend with him. It will continue to rub off on any Nationalist politician who tries to negotiate with him or wave olive branches about in full view of the public.

The tide has turned. People want Debono gone. Any suggestion that he will be retained in any shape or form, however far-fetched, will continue to transfer irritation and anger from Debono to those who try and reach out to him. This might not be helpful, given that negotiating with this particular terrorist is the only way to get the Budget through, but in the public eye Franco Debono is finished, and it is Labour which has helped finish him off by exposing him on television for what he really is.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com