It was the redoubtable, but ultimately the failed politician, Enoch Powell, who said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in mid-stream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and all human affairs.”
I was reminded of this maxim as I surveyed the contemporary political scene in Malta with the carcasses of politicians already strewn around the battlefield. Anglu Farrugia, Austin Gatt, Dolores Cristina, Franco Debono, (courageous), Jeffrey Pullicino-Orlando and others who have bitten the dust. More casualties will occur in three days' time.
For the last year, I have wrestled with the question why the Nationalist Party, for so long such a formidable winning electoral machine, now finds itself on the brink of political defeat. Enoch Powell's contention that all political lives end in failure may give us a clue. While there are a number of Nationalist politicians competing for the Powell prize, I suspect that when the history of PN during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century comes to be written, the name of Austin Gatt, as the minister primarily responsible for the greatest number of issues which have made his party so unpopular in the peoples' eyes, will stand out as one of the key reasons for its defeat in 2013.
I first met Austin Gatt in 1998 when, newly elected, he swaggered into my office at Castille, where I had been Adviser on Defence matters to Prime Ministers Eddie Fenech Adami and Alfred Sant since 1996. He had just been made Parliamentary Secretary in the Prime Minister's office. He came with a well-founded reputation as a political bruiser, who had been deeply involved in PN politics both as a student-activist and party apparatchik.
He was quickly promoted by Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi to hold some of the most testing ministerial posts in government, culminating in the last few years with responsibility for energy investment (later transferred to the over-burdened Minister for Finance), transport, major infrastructure projects and IT. He brought to his ministerial responsibilities a hectoring self-confidence and political righteousness that quickly came to epitomise in the electorate's eyes the arrogance and high-handedness of the Gonzi government.
He was also instrumental for so much else that the Gonzi administration did, well beyond his own ministerial responsibilities. This came to the fore in the run-up to the divorce referendum where, it is clear with hindsight, he heavily influenced the unbending line taken and the tactics adopted by Cabinet ministers and the Nationalist Party.
Austin Gatt made it clear early on in the public debate that he was adamantly against the introduction of divorce. He would rather resign, he said, than see it introduced. In this, he undermined the Prime Minster, who up to that point had been navigating a delicate course on an issue which divided his core party supporters. Austin Gatt’s interventions blew that precarious approach apart in order to bounce the Prime Minister and the party into a decision which he personally advocated.
Letting loose a bull in a china shop could not have been further from the Prime Minister’s interests. The consequences of Austin Gatt’s self-indulgence have been felt right up to this election. He then compounded his undermining of the Prime Minister's carefully taken position by writing a series of articles against divorce in The Times. Rarely have its readers been treated to so much special pleading, statistical sleight of hand and selective, shallow and specious arguments. His attempt at wearing the mantle of Thatcher (he was “not for turning”, he said) made readers choke with incredulity.
The botched divorce referendum was the turning point of the last Parliament. It marked the start of the Nationalist Party's now seemingly unstoppable slide into opposition. When the Nationalists look for scapegoats, Austin Gatt's undoubted part in their defeat should feature prominently. But the pattern established over divorce is indicative of so much else which he has touched in the last ten years.
Smart City has turned out to be little more than another expensive construction development with few of the “smart” jobs which had been promised. The public transport reforms proved to be long on hype and short on achievement. But perhaps the area of greatest concern must focus on Malta's strategically vital plans for future energy investment when Austin Gatt was the minister responsible for this area of government.
Decisions about the use of heavy duty oil instead of gas at the new power station; the questionable handling of the BWSC contract and the suspicions raised by the Auditor General's carefully chosen weasel words that there was “smoke but no fire”; the dilatory progress made in completing the inter-connector with Sicily; the utterly cack-handed introduction of higher utility rates (a major vote-loser if ever there was one); the dysfunctional ARMS; and the inefficiency and huge public debt accumulated by Enemalta all add up to a picture of poor governance and inept public administration for which the minister responsible was Austin Gatt (albeit, latterly, also Tonio Fenech).
In one of those curious nuggets that political crises tend to expose, the oil-gate scandal also regrettably threw up the fact that Austin Gatt had a Swiss bank account which he had failed to declare to Parliament for the last seven years, a detail in the sorry saga that still has to be satisfactorily explained.
It is strange that somebody who enjoyed the rare political qualities of energy, drive, decisiveness and organisational skills, and for whom politics has been his life-blood, should be standing down voluntarily at this election when he still could have had years of public service ahead of him. Given the circumstances of his departure, however, it is difficult to escape the conviction that Austin Gatt is the embodiment of Enoch Powell's bleak view of political lives always ending in failure. His contribution to the Nationalist Party's seemingly imminent departure to the political wilderness has been sealed.