Desperate and undignified, Leo Brincat has brought out his (obviously miniature) battering-ram and is now doing what he can to force open the door to the European Court of Auditors and a salary of around a quarter of a million euros a year, with a pension thereafter. You have to hand it to those people: they let nothing get in the way of their greed.

Brincat still has a seat in the Maltese parliament, though he gave up his cabinet post while the bird he seeks was still in the bush where it remains, and he is close to 70, which means way past the time when he should have ridden off into the sunset and rid us of the sight and sound of him. He has been a key member of the Malta Labour Party since the late 1970s – 40 long years, far too long – and was part and parcel of the utterly foul and human-rights-violating governments led by Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Does Leo Brincat have integrity? Clearly not. He wouldn’t have been an intrinsic part of that anti-democratic, pro-Soviet, anti-freedom-of-speech Mintoffian mess if he had the merest smidgeon of integrity or decency.

He scraped through the European Parliament’s committee hearing by just the one vote, and we discovered a few days afterwards – thanks to this newspaper – that the one vote was his former party leader Alfred Sant’s, who wormed his way into the committee that day as a substitute for some other MEP. Brincat sat in Sant’s cabinet back in the late 1990s, when Sant was prime minister for 22 months. Taking over from Lino Spiteri as finance minister when Spiteri resigned, Brincat was responsible for the catastrophic removal of value added tax and its replacement with a ‘square wheel’ called CET. The effect on Malta’s economy was disastrous. But Brincat didn’t care, because the most important thing to him was that he was a cabinet minister again and not just somebody with a desk job at a bank.

He didn’t resign as Lino Spiteri did, knowing full well what would happen to the economy with that crazy new complicated tax and protracted changeover. Well, we now know what his views on resignation are even when the public interest is threatened, because he told a newspaper in the wake of the European Parliament committee vote: “I thought about resigning (because of the Panama Papers), but then decided not to, because when you resign you are a hero for the day and then you are lost in the wilderness. I decided to stay in the party and try to change it from within.” Change it from within? The only way he would have been able to do that is by forcing a coup for the removal of Muscat – for it is only by removing Muscat that you can remove his two henchmen, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri. That is a clearly a triumvirate and Muscat is part and parcel of it.

Within a couple of days Brincat was exposed as a liar, or perhaps a partial-truth-teller. This newspaper found out that he had never discussed his resignation with the prime minister, which you would think to be the absolute minimum requirement had the man really meant it. And it was those comments to the newspaper that really did for Brincat when he was resoundingly rejected by the European Parliament itself, the gap between the votes against him and the votes for being so enormous that anybody not equipped with the rhinoceros hide of a total absence of dignity, sense of shame and self-awareness, which comes from having served two human-rights-violating and pro-Soviet prime ministers, would have crawled away to fall on his sword in some dark cupboard under the stairs.

For when asked why he voted to protect Konrad ‘Panama Papers’ Mizzi in the confidence vote brought by the Opposition in the Maltese parliament, Leo Brincat said that he had no choice but to vote with the party whip. Then he blathered on about how Malta uses the Westminster system and how that means he couldn’t vote against the whip and blah-de-blah. I read that and thought “What a bleeding fraud. He’s counting on the fact that almost nobody in Malta knows what the whip and the Westminster system are, and the frigging idiot, because he’s from the dinosaur era, still thinks that whatever he says to a newspaper in Malta stays with a Maltese readership. The MEPs are going to rip him to shreds over that one.” And that’s just what they did.

Because of course a member of parliament can vote against the whip. There is absolutely nothing to stop him or her doing so. You may be disciplined for doing so, but fear of discipline should not stand in the way of integrity when serving the public interest or one’s conscience. Malta’s is actually different from the Westminster system in that the House of Commons has different grades of whip: a three-line whip, for instance, is used for major votes, and is subject to the greatest level of disciplinary measures if a member of parliament votes against the whip. The highest level of discipline is expulsion from the party or withdrawal of the whip from the renegade MP. But Muscat would have done neither to Leo Brincat had he voted with the Opposition and against Konrad Mizzi. It wouldn’t have been in his interest to do so. But then he wouldn’t have put Brincat forward for the European Court of Auditors job, and that salary must mean more to Brincat than his integrity or Malta’s best interests.

The truth of the matter is that Leo Brincat didn’t vote against Konrad Mizzi because he didn’t want to. It was his choice and the whip had nothing to do with it. Even if the prime minister had allowed a free vote, Brincat would still have voted the way he did because that is exactly how he has been throughout his political life. He never once stood up to be counted, not even when human rights were routinely violated by the government he served back in the 1980s. On the contrary, there is video footage from back then showing him rising to his feet and cheering and clapping like a lunatic as Prime Minister Mintoff rages and yells that he is prepared to arm his supporters with weapons against the Opposition. Too bad the MEPs won’t have understood that, if they watched it at all. 

The readers of Maltese newspapers may not know how the party whip functions, or what the Westminster system is, but you can bet your last cent that every single member of the European Parliament knows that MPs not only can but actually should vote against the party line if their conscience so dictates and if the public interest is at stake. Unlike Malta’s Brincat, who seems to think that an MP’s primary loyalty is to the party, they know that they are there to serve those who elected them.

Now Brincat is set to take his suit before the European Council, hoping that they will defy the European Parliament’s overwhelming rejection of him. And he does so with Muscat’s backing, which means more bad blood for Malta in the run-up to the European Presidency.

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