Oops, sorry: I meant to write ‘beach-ball’ but something went awry with my fingers when I looked at that picture of the Minister for the Economy taking a break from bar-hopping to call a press conference about the deputy Opposition leader’s swimming-pool. Yes, his swimming-pool. The deputy Opposition leader’s. He sat there with a single book-end who used to be a Nationalist Party councillor and is now an angry and embittered ‘ex Nazzjonalist’, presumably because the Prime Minister could find no other flunkeys in his court who would haul themselves before the press in such a pathetic and ridiculous attempt at fending off the swirl of scandal called Panamagate.
Was anybody impressed? Apart from the usual fixated and mentally-blocked diehards who are still discussing Austin Gatt three years into a Labour government, the answer is no. The internet is now awash with swimming-pool jokes, sarcastic remarks and memes that are largely pejorative to Chris Cardona and the Labour government. The government should have seen this one coming, but didn’t. “Chris Cardona wants to know if Beppe’s is bigger than his.” “Why doesn’t Chris Cardona tell us about his house? Because he no longer has one.” “Still sofa-surfing, Chris?”
The non-scandal boomeranged rather badly when I uploaded a post yesterday morning revealing that Joseph Muscat, when he was just 24 in 1998, applied for permission to demolish a house in Burmarrad and to build a storeroom, a maisonette, and a house with a swimming-pool on the site. Labour was in power, his boss Alfred Sant was prime minister, and his girlfriend Michelle Tanti was personal assistant to the Minister for Public Works, Charles Buhagiar. The permit was approved in just one month, even before the period for the registration of objections had expired (in clear violation of the regulations).
Oh, and Muscat’s swimming-pool is bigger than Fenech Adami’s. I say that for the benefit of the Minister for the Economy, who no longer has access to his own swimming-pool and seems rather peeved about it.
The government is obviously, and pathetically, using this story in an attempt to get us to stop focusing on Panamagate. Instead, it has done the precise opposite and merely added to the sensation that we are sinking in corruption and that the government is desperate to get out of the Panamagate mess – and that only compounds people’s perception of how bad the mess must be. If the government is resorting to flying drones over the deputy Opposition leader’s house and getting the Justice Minister’s girlfriend to try to create a skandlu on the party TV station, people conclude their this extreme desperation must be directly caused by an extreme problem at the other end.
There is no way out of Panamagate for them – it is not going to blow over or go away. The Prime Minister knows, as a seasoned scandal-monger trained in the Super One stable, that despite his best hopes it is not going to happen. This is the sort of scandal that has got to be dealt with decisively by amputating Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri and launching a police inquiry. But the Prime Minister can’t do that and so people have reached the obvious conclusion, suspecting that he is involved too and that is why he can’t or won’t get rid of them. So that means amputating himself too and the end of the government, but they want to stay on and carry on making hay and delivering on whatever debts they have organised for whatever is going into those companies in Panama.
They are going to stick it out and while public resentment builds up – people are now even talking about Panamagate on the factory shop-floor, which means that the scandal has saturated Maltese society – they are going to try to defend themselves by flinging paltry missiles at the Opposition and their critics.
Joseph Muscat’s government is writing the longest suicide note in Maltese history.
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