Muscat, Mizzi, Schembri keep dominating the news and they’re boring us to tears. We’re tired of the protracted saga in which they’re co-starring. People want justice, and they want it now.

More than a year has passed since these three wheeler-dealers had to step down and they’re still haunting the political scene, insulting us by constantly adding more damage to the damage they’ve already inflicted on the country’s reputation. Ask the top man at Malta’s largest Bank and he’ll (undoubtedly reluctantly) give you a guided tour of Malta’s stinky reputational “attractions”.

But the foulest smell comes from the role the current Prime Minister played in Muscat’s rotten administration. A few months ago, PN MP David Thake asked an extremely important question in Parliament, though nothing came out of it. I think he should persevere.

MP Thake intelligently asked the current Prime Minister to lay bare what advice he gave then-Prime Minister Muscat when Dr Abela was Muscat’s legal advisor. I’m sure that Mr Thake was not asking about personal legal advice given, also because, like yours truly, Mr Thake assumes that such advice wouldn’t have been paid for by the Treasury. David Thake asked for the topics which Robert Abela advised Joseph Muscat on during the Panama Papers saga and after Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, what the actual advice was, and any amount paid for this advice.

Dr Abela was quite understandably caught on the wrong foot. The question was intelligent, pertinent, and – for Dr Abela – dangerous. Frankly, I don’t really care how much he was paid, as that’s not, at least for now, a political matter. Also, Dr Abela might be right to argue that the legal advice he gave Muscat between June 2017 and January 2020 was “of a privileged and confidential nature”. The advice itself, that is. But the topics on which the advice was given are politically significant, and very much so, and David Thake was right to ask the question and he should persevere until he gets us an answer.

When I say “us”, I mean the entire Maltese electorate. All Maltese with properly-functioning neurones want to know the part played by Robert Abela in the saga for which Muscat, Schembri and Mizzi are being interrogated and called to testify. All the Maltese want – and need – to know on what topics Dr Abela advised Muscat. If he advised on routine affairs, then the matter should stop there. But if he advised on the Panama Papers scandal and/or the Caruana Galizia assassination, then we need to understand Dr Abela’s role. If Dr Abela has nothing to hide, he should be upfront and declare what is clearly of political significance. “Upfront” means “bold, honest, and frank”.

Turbulence

But Dr Abela constantly finds himself flying through turbulence. Consider two examples.

First, after only a few months in office, Dr Abela realises he needs to reshuffle the Cabinet, discarding Silvio Parnis in the process. Don’t get me wrong on this last bit. I’m not saying that the Hon. Parnis did a good job. But I would have expected the Prime Minister to direct the former Parliamentary Secretary instead of letting him bungle (with the consequences we’re all aware of) only then to chop his political head off while he was grovelling at his prime-ministerial feet. It smacks so much of planned execution. I think Mr Parnis deserved better: the Prime Minister should have guided him. And if he indeed did, then the failure was fathered by both men not just by Mr Parnis, with implications too obvious to require spelling out.

Second, Dr Abela’s weakness is worrying for the country particularly at this sensitive moment when we need to restore our reputation to pre-Panama Papers levels. Consider that though Dr Abela (admirably, I must hasten to add) has declared that under his leadership Labour will not legalise abortion, Cyrus Engerer has openly declared he’s for abortion rights. Consider that, while Dr Abela has not expressed himself in favour of euthanasia (at least, not as far as I’m aware of), his Deputy Leader (and Mr Engerer again) stated their pro-active support for this barbaric practice.

That these suggestions keep raising their ugly head despite the Party Leader’s declared opposition to them, betrays Dr Abela’s real predicament. It shows weakness while the country desperately needs strength. Not because of so-called civil liberties but because of its topmost objective to survive as a respectable jurisdiction in a cut-throat world. In their quest to attract scarce direct foreign investment, jurisdictions are constantly at war with each other, and their arsenals consist of their reputations and the solidity of their regulatory frameworks.

Is Robert Abela being bold, honest, and frank about all of this? If not even his Deputies respect his word, how can Dr Abela convince the world at large that his leadership is respected in the financial sector?

Rationality v. irrationality

A few days ago, my friend since University days Dr Alan Xuereb, penned an intelligent piece elsewhere in the press, arguing that, as an adherent to a particular school of philosophy, he can accept LGBTIQ+ values but not abortion. This is the rational position embraced by the vast majority of the Maltese.

There are three positions. (1) The punitive, that wants to punish LGBTIQ+ people (this is Fascist and bigot). (2) The enthusiastic, that wants to promote the LGBTIQ+ lifestyle (Neoliberal and libertine). (3) The neutral, that tolerates and accepts (to my mind, Christian and rational).

For clarity’s sake, the third way is not a synthesis of the other two; it’s the rational position and therefore in complete contradiction to the others, that are irrational. The Fascist, bigot, position is irrational because it punishes people for something they shouldn’t be punished for. The Neoliberal, libertine, position too is irrational: it promotes something that, if taken on its own terms, needs no promotion. The third way is rational as it accepts humanity’s inherent diversity.

The battle between rationality (order) and irrationality (disorder or chaos) is primordial, if not archetypal. The leaders of a community have the primary duty to strike the right balance between order and chaos, so as to avoid tyranny on the one hand and anarchy on the other. This is the greatest challenge faced by politics. But when politics is subjugated to the dictates of the economy, the balance is lost. We end up with the tyranny of anarchy, in which you have to embrace anarchic values – what Jonah Goldberg intelligently labelled as “Liberal Fascism” in his book bearing that title.

But with regard to another Neoliberal battle-cry – that pushes abortion as a normal family decision – the Christian, rational position can neither tolerate nor accept. In the mid-20th century, this was the position of the United Nations too, when researchers established that abortion was the preferred family planning tool of the poor, undeveloped countries and proposed a push toward contraception as the rational family planning tool for the entire world. This rational position was ditched when the Neoliberal, libertine frenzy took over and pushed abortion as a God-given right. Literally. Only a few months ago, the Anglican Church (led by a benighted cleric, I deduce) admitted the acceptability of abortion on the spurious grounds that we don’t know when life begins. I always thought that the English adhered to a wise maxim, “when in doubt, leave out”. But Britain has become so enslaved to the market ideology that not only does it call its festive days “Bank holidays” but now it promotes abortion as rational family planning, with its NHS nonchalantly telling regular folk that one-third of all women in Britain have had an abortion, as if that were something all women should aspire to. Like a deadly virus, this irrationality is infecting some of our doctors who study medicine in Britain or learn from British books. To put it in terms that I suspect are beginning to sound dated, our national Independence is only formal – where it matters, in the head that is, we are still subjugated to the former Colonial Master, who, to put it bluntly, couldn’t care less about us.

I’d like to say something to all pro-life campaigners, that I have been wanting to say for a long time but never found the right occasion. Beware of the pro-abortion campaigners and avoid their trap at all costs: the abortion debate is not one of antinomy (both positions are reasonable) but of contradiction (one of the two positions is invalid).

My Personal Video Library (7)

Last week, I wrote about how Sergio Leone’s former assistant Enzo Barboni’s idea of directing an Italian Western parody unexpectedly broke box office records. In 1970, cinemagoers were suffering indigestion: too many Spaghetti Westerns (some had been good, others bad, and many, many others still, nothing but ugly) had upset their collective stomach. Barboni recruited Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, shot They Call Me Trinity and its sequel Trinity is Still My Name (1971) and made history.

To my mind, these two intelligent comedies represent the attitude of one social class toward mid-/high-brow debate. Whereas Leone’s, Corbucci’s, and Sollima’s movies were, in a way, intellectual, il popolo wanted (intelligent) entertainment; Trinity was intelligent without being intellectual. This is what il popolo wants even from politics.

But it was also what infuriated Leone! He reacted with a brilliant, even more intellectual, movie called My Name is Nobody (1973), starring Terence Hill and Henry Fonda. Leone co-produced; Tonino Valerii directed but the direction is à la Leone. The movie contains the Italian Western’s testament, in a letter written by Henry Fonda’s “Jack Beauregard” to Terence Hill’s “Nobody”:

“Dear Nobody, [...] you can preserve a little of that illusion that made my generation tick. [...] I guess looking back, it seems we were all a bunch of romantic fools. We still believed that a good pistol and a quick showdown could solve everything. But then, the West used to be wide-open spaces with lots of elbow room, and you never ran into the same person twice. By the time you came along, it was changed. It got smaller and crowded, and I kept bumping into the same people all the time. But if you’re able to run around in the West peacefully catching flies, it’s only ’cause fellows like me were there first. [...] Anyhow, I was getting to be one more old-timer, and the years don’t make wisdom, they just make old age. One can be young in years and old in hours, like you.”

Leone had the last, dignified word. What beauty!

Leone then produced (and directed the opening scene of) A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975), but this was a post-scriptum we can ignore without incurring any loss. It did, however, star Patrick McGoohan, about whom I’ll write in the coming weeks.