What you’ll get is what you’ve never even imagined

...but let's leave the wildly speculative attempts at fortune telling for the end of this article (which I predict will be in around 1,500 words' time). Instead, please join me in a moment of dignified silence, in remembrance of this thing called 'Political Credibility' that unexpectedly passed away last Tuesday at approximately 6pm.

No, for a change it's not the credibility of Maltese political parties I had in mind (a little too late for that anyway.) More like the credibility of the European Parliament and its related institutions: you know, the ones which promised us a 'severe but fair grilling' of Tonio Borg... yet instead gave us what we all saw and heard last Tuesday.

In other words, the equivalent of Barney the Friendly, Huggable and Oh! So Cute Dinosaur being engaged in a polite but pointless three-hour conservation by the Care Bears' more loving and considerate cousins... on Prozac.

Seriously, folks. What on earth was all that even about? Never mind the 'fair' bit - though it seems the word changes meaning the further north you travel in Europe; and by the time you reach Flanders it will signify 'bending over backwards to accommodate your subject in every detail, while making his life as obscenely comfortable as possible'.

Personally I am more concerned with the complete and utter lack of anything resembling 'severity' throughout proceedings. For let's be honest: if what passes for a 'grilling' in Brussels these days consists in nothing but a three-hour exchange of meaningless pleasantries... can you imagine what the annual European Parliament barbecue would be like? I can see it all now: shiny happy MEPs, all holding hands in a circle... and chanting 'Kumbaya' as the chairman lightly toasts a single cocktail sausage over a lit match.

Oh yes, and maybe  the occasional reminder of how jolly good it is to always be courteous to one another... while a certain Simon Busuttil gets so excited that he just can't help bursting into spontaneous applause every time Tonio Borg flutters his eyelashes in his general direction... (which I can more or less understand... seeing as how, every time this happens, a nice new vacancy seems to magically open up for the Nationalist Party's Boy Wonder..).

Severe but fair grilling, my eye. More like tea and biscuits with the Salvation Army. Meanwhile we heard Tonio Borg - for yes, contrary to various reports it really was our former Home Affairs Minister up there on the podium, and not some clone or body-snatching alien invader, as so many people seemed to think - described as a 'champion of human rights', no less. And guess what? Not even the tiniest of murmurs arose among the representatives of Europe's 500 million citizens to challenge what is arguably the single most incredibly exaggerated assertion ever made in the entire history of Wallonia.

What a bloody let-down. And there I was thinking that it was Joseph Muscat who might have gone all soft on us, when he took over the previously militant Malta Labour Party, and slowly bled all the aggression out of it until all that was left was a local equivalent of Moana Pozzi's 'Partito Dell Amore' (only without any local equivalent of Moana Pozzi... which sort of defeats the whole purpose, don't ya think?).

Now that I've seen how politicians operate in drizzly Brussels... what can I say? Joseph 'Love Each Other As I Have Loved You' Muscat makes the EU's entire approach look like Coccolino the Incurably Cuddly Diarrhoea-Coloured Teddy Bear from those god-awful detergent ads on Italian TV.

You may be familiar with the one I mean: "Ciao! Sono io, Coccolino, quel morbido orsachiotto carino e tenero, che tutti vogliono prendere per il collo e strappare in mille pezzettini piccoli piccoli..."

Um.. sorry about that: it's just that for some mysterious reason, the mere mention of the word 'Coccolino' fills my mind with visions of soft white Teddy-Bear stuffing, falling gracefully around the room like so many snowflakes...weird, I know.)

Right, where was I? Ah yes, TV. (That's short for 'television', for those of you who belong to the post-Internet generation). As it turned out, the prospect of Tonio Borg actually having to answer a couple of questions for the first time in his entire political career - and in a 'severe but fair grilling', too! - was so utterly alluring, that I actually resolved to watch the goddamn thing on a TV set myself, or perish in the attempt.

Needless to say this created unprecedented logistical problems, in a household where there is simply no such thing as a TV set that can be physically switched on (there are, however, two that can't... and you can just imagine how utterly useful they proved last Tuesday).

This left me with the option of watching it on the office TV set: which works absolutely fine, no problem there... The only snag is that it's strategically positioned to be inaccessible to all but the occasional passing Yeti who happens to be over 18 foot tall... or alternatively someone who has enough mountaineering experience to negotiate the assorted piles of newspapers that have accumulated below over the past 10 years.

Sadly, no Yetis were available at such short notice, and I couldn't find Marco Cremona's number on my mobile... so in the end I had to scale that mountain of MaltaToday myself.

In any case: you will all be pleased to know that I officially regained my breath around four minutes ago, and that the exertion was not entirely for naught. In the end I managed to tune in to the Tonio Borg Show almost immediately as he was being introduced by the Statler and Waldorf look-alike comperes sitting behind him... only to immediately discover that the entire hearing was being streamed online anyway, so no TV set was even necessary.

Much blasphemy was heard in a certain locality in San Gwann that particular afternoon... nothing to do with me, I swear... but between online streaming and that distant TV set, high up against the wall in the far corner, I managed to watch most, if not all, of Borg's performance last Tuesday (which has since been Oscar-nominated in the newly introduced category of Actor Who Succeeds in Keeping A Straight Face Despite Uttering Some of the Most Laughable Lines in Movie History).

In practice this meant three hours of Tonio Borg being lauded, praised, acclaimed, toasted (not in any culinary sense), feted, applauded, commended, and practically carried out shoulder-high by a troop of appreciative spectators... with only one, possibly two MEPs expressing a sentiment that might have been very distantly related to 'misgiving'.

Small wonder he would sail through the sitting with such ease. It was as almost as though Borg had written the MEPs' questions for them himself. And this alone might explain why so many of them exhibited such enormous interest in cows, sheep, pigs, and cute cuddly little bunny rabbits... but not in that other animal Borg's tenure of office might conceivably affect: human beings.

So in the end not a single measly little Europarliamentarian asked Tonio Borg any question about his own 12-year record as the minister responsible for (among others) immigration.

Nor did anybody pause to question the suitability for the post of European Commissioner of a man who has received multiple damning reports by the UN's Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Degrading Treatment: all pointing towards serious violations of human rights that took place on his watch.

And nobody asked him about the Eritrean deportation, either. And yet it was a decision that tells us so very much about the man who will shortly be responsible for European public health.

One thing it explains is what he really meant when he said those ominous words: "I will respect the Treaties". It works like this: if there is a legalistic pretext (and ideally, the more legalistic, the better) that could allow Tonio Borg to take the wrong decision, with indescribably awful consequences for other people, and get away with it all the same... that is precisely what he will do.

So long as he can be demonstrated to have observed the letter (the LETTER, please note - not the spirit) of any given law... then as far as he is concerned he cannot be criticized for anything that might happens afterwards as a result of his own actions or decisions.

So because there was no specific law telling him in as many words that... no, Tonio, you can't send those Eritreans back to their war-torn country because they will be tortured, imprisoned and killed on their return (Duh!)... well, then he can deport those Eritreans and to hell with the consequences, because legally... he is right.

And so what, if it later transpires that: yes, as predicted some of them they were tortured and killed? That's not Tonio Borg's fault. It's the fault of international law and case history, for not spoon-feeding him every step of the way.

Those are Tonio Borg's principles, by the way; though I imagine that Europeans will very soon discover this for themselves. Meanwhile the people doing the 'severe but fair' grilling last Tuesday seemed at moments to be unaware that the same Borg also has a 15-20 year history back here in Malta.

So anyone following the hearings could easily have come away with the impression that Tonio Borg was not responsible for the astonishing mismanagement that has reduced Malta's only prison into the administrative equivalent of a black hole: with an inmate population that has increased exponentially since he took over the portfolio in 1996... with no corresponding changes at all to the number of warders assigned to guard duty.

I'll leave you to imagine the result of this novel approach to prison management. Suffice it to say that the entire country was earlier this year shocked to discover that the female section had been home to a fully-fledged drug trafficking operation (with a Judge concluding in open court that this could only have been possible with the collusion of prison officials) at the time when Tonio Borg was politically responsible for prison.

Well, 'responsible' in the broadest sense of the word imaginable. Certainly he did not take 'responsibility' for the revelations that rocked Malta and sapped the nation's confidence in its own justice system. Instead he just returned the time-honoured answer that we in the Maltese press have come to expect from the man. "Drugs? Prison? What on earth are you on about?"

Very soon, the health of 500 million EU citizens - not to mention all those horses, pigs, cows and donkeys (genetically engineered or otherwise ) - will be added to the ever growing list of things that Tonio Borg is/was/has been responsible for, despite not being entirely sure what they are, or in some cases whether they even exist or not.

I don't know about you, but I for one will not miss the ensuing spectacle for anything. In fact I might even invest in a TV with a functional 'ON' button... but one step at a time.