If I could direct a cartoon artist for today’s issue, I would tell him to draw Prime Minister Robert Abela in all his monumental build surrounded by a horde of attacking dogs yapping at his heels.

They would not have got him down if the attack lasted but minutes but who knows if the attack were to last longer?

For quite a long time the issue regarding the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia lived only on what was emerging from the court sittings. But then not everyone has the time and inclination to read through long court reports.

Then all of a sudden one of the men arraigned and charged with the killing broke away and demanded a presidential pardon for an unconnected murder, that of lawyer Carmel Chircop, on condition that he reveals all he knows on the journalist’s murder. He also pleaded guilty to his part in the murder and was condemned to 15 years in jail.

Things followed on from there. Other people were arrested. That was when Robert Abela made his monumental mistake. All the people involved in Daphne’s murder have now been arrested, he said. And replying to persistent questions by the media , including one from this newsroom, he  denied any past or present minister have been mentioned. Or he used words to that effect, maybe cloaked in lawyer-speak to mask conditionality. But no sooner was this uttered that the media began to reply in the way it knows – by releasing stories which would seem to directly contradict the PM’s statement. Hence the idea for a cartoon I mentioned at the beginning.

Repeated surveys over the past months have shown the prime minister’s popularity plummeting, though so far he is still ahead of his direct opponent. Add to this potent mix the impact of the Covid pandemic where Malta is not doing so well as the prime minister would have us believe. Add also the fallout from the long-drawn-out Rosianne case of a Cabinet member found out to be too friendly with the person charged with being the mastermind behind Daphne’s murder. Defended by her party leader and denying till the last minute, she must have contributed to his plunging popularity at the same time proving him right when he brought in outsiders to Cabinet.

By and large, Abela tends to many times be the victim of his own mouth, making claims that will later be used to ridicule him. His hyperbole can later bury him.

When he sought to succeed Joseph Muscat (and he was the underdog then), he must have had to promise to many on the right and in the left and he is now beholden to his promises. Nevertheless, it has to be said, he has taken some drastic measures. Yet he still carries an albatross or two around his neck and I honestly cannot see him shaking them off.

Repubblika has now called for a resumption of the November/December 2019 protests. Those protests ended with the resignation of Muscat after two successive general election successes and 10 electoral victories in all. This is now a new government but the issues remain the same. All else is put on the back burner hoping for better times – the vouchers, the resumption of flights and tourism, the state of the economy, etc.

But the central issues remain Malta’s shaky international reputation and tackling law and order, and breaking off the strangle-hold organised crime seems to have in most areas of public and private life.

The revelations of the past days on the ramifications of organised crime not just in the drugs scene and the entertainment scene but also in humdrum areas such as supermarket chains and the like with bomb attempts all over the place even in public areas where innocents could have been hit are very telling.

We have been bad in the past but not this bad. Or maybe we were always this sleazy but did not notice. As Daphne wrote minutes before she was killed, “there are crooks everywhere”.

Until and unless this state of affairs is directly confronted, we will not come out of the cloud we are under. Anything else is a waste of time – the roads about which this government brags so much, the health service now creaking under the weight of Covid, social justice which still pushes people to the margins, the educational system about which there is so much to say ....

We may condense our national life to this one theme – the rule of law. All else is peripheral. Yet this is one theme that Abela and his team simply refuse to address, while loudly claiming they are tackling it.

 

Farewell, Vince

The sudden announcement of the death of Vince Farrugia on Friday saddens those who like me were around in his heyday.

There was a time when Vince was more popular than the prime minister of the time, when his words moved crowds, when he had power, real power.

Then what happened took place and Vince fell silent. The country missed honouring him for all his efforts, as the country usually does.

He deserved better.

 

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