The newspapers have reported that when Joseph Muscat met Angela Merkel yesterday in Berlin, informally, she asked him whether he had had a good relationship with his predecessor. Merkel’s was clearly a pointed question. She herself had rather liked Lawrence Gonzi and made it clear on more than one occasion that she thought highly of him and of Malta’s economic performance under his administration. She also seemed to quite like him on a personal basis, as evident from the body language in video footage and photographs of their encounters at EU-level meetings.

The same cannot be said of her encounters with Joseph Muscat, photographs and film footage of which indicate that Merkel is guarded in his presence, quite stand-offish and displaying the body language of polite formality and even, in at least one video which was shared many thousands of times on Facebook, in which she was seen politely telling Muscat that she wanted to speak to her companions without him around, leaving him hanging about like a spare wheel that had come off, actually quite bristly.

Muscat, meanwhile, is shown doing all the running, laughing and flirting and trying to charm her – methods which work like magic on men in Malta but which will not work in the Merkel context. This is not just because Angela Merkel is the sort of woman she is, immune to flattery of that nature as otherwise she would not be where she is now, but also because, in behaving that way, Joseph Muscat immediately slots himself onto a lower rung. Lawrence Gonzi related to Angela Merkel as an equal – equal, that is, in maturity. And he knew how to communicate with Europe’s most powerful woman. Muscat obviously does not. Simply by watching the film footage, I can tell that he’s giving her all the wrong vibes and she’s thinking ‘oh my, what a pest – what on earth am I going to speak to this one about.’

Muscat responded to Merkel’s question about his relationship with Gonzi by saying that he had a good relationship with him, a better relationship than he has with his successor, Simon Busuttil. He couldn’t have given a less smart answer than that. Merkel is not some Maltese real estate developer at a reception hosted by Sandro Chetcuti, ready to lap up Muscat’s uncalled-for remarks and feeling flattered that he should have confided something like that. Merkel is a stateswoman, a diplomat. She herself would never pass a remark like that in response to a question like hers. People operating at that level are expected to be masters of the non-answer. It is a requirement not just of statesmen and diplomats, but of anybody who is properly brought up. Measure your words when replying to a loaded or pointed question. Give a non-answer. It’s a code everyone at that level is meant to understand.

Muscat’s response must have confirmed Merkel in what appears to be her rather guarded and unfavourable view of him. But then that’s why she would have asked the question in the first place – so as to be able to assess him further by how he replied. Muscat should have known that. It’s part of the code. He should have had the wit to assume that Merkel knows already, as do the rest of us, what his relationship with Lawrence Gonzi was like (extremely bad) and that even if she did not follow the news or wasn’t well briefed, she had plenty of access to Gonzi while he was prime minister, and a warm relationship with him, so if she was going to ask anybody how he got on with Muscat, she would obviously have asked him and in that case, the question would not have been loaded. 

Angela Merkel’s unspoken reaction to Muscat’s answer must have been ‘If you call that a good relationship, I’d like to know what some of your bad relationships are like.’ And that would have been followed quickly by, ‘What an idiot, to volunteer the information that he doesn’t get along with Simon Busuttil, when I never asked him and he’s completely out of order to say something like that anyway.’ Of course he was completely out of order. Can you imagine, and I use the example because it is the one with which people in Malta are most familiar, Prime Minister David Cameron going to a bilateral meeting in France or Germany or Italy and telling the heads of government in those countries how he doesn’t like Ed Miliband and doesn’t get along with him. It would never happen. Do I really need to explain why?

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