I never thought I would find myself writing about the Eurovision Song Contest in the middle of a terrible corruption scandal with no end in sight, but because Team Ira was really Team Labour, and a metaphor for much that is wrong with this government, I will, because it’s important. And please bear in mind that this is not about Ira Losco, but about the people who used her.

The worst part of it was the wall-to-wall falseness on which the Labour Party and government build everything, even a singer in a contest. First they chose a singer, and then they built a fake competition around her to make it look like the outcome wasn’t preordained, except that everyone knew it was. The other hopefuls were simply used as blinds and beards, with no respect or consideration for their feelings or the time and money they had invested in competing. On a whole different level, this is just like the ‘competitive calls’ for expressions of interest on the power station and the privatisation of hospitals. It’s the way they do things.

After the pre-selected singer ‘won the competition’, they changed the song. We were told that it wasn’t the song that had won, after all, but the singer. They then proceeded to throw a pile of public money at getting the result they wanted for the government, while refusing to answer all press questions about how much public money they were spending and who was involved. Again, just like the power station and the hospitals.

Then, late in the day, we discovered through a chance note in the BBC’s entertainment diary that one Leslie Skipper, described as a journalist, was speaking for Ira Losco in Stockholm. Only back here in Malta we know that Skipper isn’t a journalist but on the payroll at the Office of the Prime Minister as a communications consultant. So the Prime Minister had sent his own state-paid communications consultant to help get the result he wanted.

Miss Losco’s outfit became a matter of supreme importance to the people in charge at Public Broadcasting Services Ltd, more important by far than their real job of making sure that TVM and Radio Malta serve the interests of the public rather than those of the government and the tacky-taste majority. Then a vast congregation of people and assorted TaghnaLkollers flew to Stockholm on the public dime, all crowding together to ‘work for Malta’. This is the one aspect in which the metaphor fails, because the days of government delegations are gone, with the Prime Minister now flies out to strike deals alone with his Special Minister and his chief of staff, carrying only their minaudiere, Kurt Farrugia.

One of the most disgraceful aspects of this charade, though, was the way they handled Ira Losco’s pregnancy. They had to be false even there, and in this, they were unfair to her – but they didn’t care about that because she was no longer a person but an instrument and the means to their determined end. If you count back to the Song for Europe contest in January, you will see that Miss Losco was pregnant already when they chose her as the preordained winner. So we just have to ask: what on earth were they thinking? Even if they did not know at that early stage – and surely she would have told them – did they think it was somehow going away? Or did they imagine that putting a six-month pregnant woman on the stage would somehow constitute a great act? I am beginning to suspect it was the latter – that they saw ‘pregnant Ira’ as some kind of stage act. And if that’s the case, then they were quite mad. Having a baby is not some kind of unique stunt. You only have to bear in mind that each one of the 200 million people watching the show was once in somebody’s womb.

In full awareness of her pregnancy, and despite knowing what a woman begins to look like when she has moved past the five-month mark – the hormones really kick in and the whole body thickens and not just the bump - they forged ahead with that crazy dress. As most sane people know, the overtly sexy look is in direct conflict with pregnancy, for reasons that should be obvious but which are clearly not to the members of the TaghnaLkoll troupe. Yes, there are some perverts who are very interested in women who are pregnant by other men, and no doubt there are weird sites dedicated to this fetish, but I think that for the purposes of the Eurovision Song Contest we can leave them aside.

The most disgusting thing is the way they used Miss Losco to try to achieve their own crazy dreams while feeding hers. At a time when she should have been resting, taking it easy, eating well, relaxing, preparing her body and her mind for the physical trauma ahead, she was instead counting the calories to stay in shape and hide the physical effects of pregnancy, unconsciously hunching to conceal her stomach during television appearances, rehearsing, hassling, running around, stressing out, being harassed by that awful ‘team’ and shoved in front of the media. The toll it took on her and the baby can’t have been negligible.

The first thing I noticed about Miss Losco’s first public performance earlier in the week was that she was scared to move. Ordinarily, she would have been twisting around with her dancer and shaking her body about. That was part of her winning appeal back in 2002 when she was just 21. She would even have had moves choreographed with her dancer’s. But this time she stood stiff as a ramrod, rigid, and that made the dancer look notably ridiculous as he leaped like a frog around her, pointlessly. Why was he even there?

I realised immediately what the problem was: they had shoved her out there, a six-month-pregnant woman, in a pair of skyscraper heels with a hemthat was low enough to catch in them. She was scared to move. Taking a tumble in front of a major audience is embarrassing, but taking a tumble when you’re 35 and six months pregnant is downright dangerous.

And that is when my heart went out to her. Heavily pregnant (whether you’re big or not, that’s still a six-month foetus inside you), with sequinned scallops tacked to breasts that had so obviously been reconstructed to a shape that does not exist in nature, her naturally flawless complexion obscured by horrible thick bronze make-up, looking 10 years older than her real age, and wearing leg-lengthening heels in a tacky thigh-slit dress straight out of another era – what was that about? You can tell that Scarface is Team Labour’sfavourite film, because they fixed that dress for Elvira Hancock.

In medical terms, Ira Losco is what is known as an ‘elderly primagravida’, which means a first pregnancy/birth at 35 and over. This is writ large on the medical notes because special care and attention are crucial. There are risks at that age, both during pregnancy and birth, which is why most such births now take place by Caesarean section to spare both mother and baby the toll of a long and unproductive labour. 

Yet instead of getting the special care she needs, and having an easy time of it, Miss Losco was rushed about town and put under very major stress. What for, exactly, if not to achieve a political goal for a self-serving government that doesn’t care about the risk to her health and that of her baby? At one point, she actually looked as though she would rather be anywhere else but there, but was behaving professionally all the same.

Good on you, Ira, for keeping professional standards – but you should have pulled out and got your priorities right. At this point in your life, you and your baby come first. Everybody else can and should have been sent to hell. Good luck with that baby – you will make an excellent mother. But keep those leeches at bay and give the child a normal life by not allowing them anywhere near.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com