When the price is right

Before the Labour party was elected to government, there was a Bondiplus programme at the end of which Joseph Muscat jokingly told Lou Bondì that he would eventually even make him (Bondì) vote Labour. Lou’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and he laughed at Muscat’s cheekiness. Many watching had a similar reaction. The mere idea that Bondì would ever support the Labour party was so preposterous it did not even merit consideration.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find that particular video clip but it is still very clear in many of our memories. I did, however, manage to find Lou Bondì's own reference to it on his now defunct Bondiplus blog: “Indeed, Joseph Muscat himself - and rightly so - has told me three times on Bondi+ that he will manage to convince me to vote for him and his party.”

I also found an interview by Josef Bonello where Bondì had said that people should not be labelled as “Labour” or “Nationalist” for life, but should always feel free to vote for whichever party they think is best. On that I agree with him completely.

I don’t feel it is any of my business who people vote for, I cannot stand the PN and PL labels which people so readily throw around and I really would not care if Lou Bondì had switched from PN to PL because he thought that the Labour party deserved to be in government; after all, everyone has a right to change their mind. And, as the last two elections have amply demonstrated, who knows what anyone does in the privacy of that polling booth anyway? 

But Lou Bondì is not your average Joe, nor could he remotely be described as as one of those anonymous floating voters who each time, make or break the political careers of so many politicians and political parties. Just in case it needs to be spelt out, the difference between Bondì and anyone else, is that Bondì was a media power player for a very long time on the national station with a prime time talk show which wielded a considerable amount of influence on public opinion.

What subjects he chose to tackle (and just as significantly how they were tackled) often set the tone of public discourse and, in the years leading up to the elections, it was clear from the way he spoke to his guests that he was finding it more and more difficult to adhere to his role of being an objective presenter who could leave his own political sentiments outside the studio. In fact, his ill-advised decision to launch the above-mentioned political blog in 2011 was just one example of how he was struggling to remain impartial (he was eventually given instructions to stop blogging because it conflicted with his job as a TV presenter on PBS).

For the Labour party, he became the focus of what they described as the hijacking of the national station by the PN. In short, he became their Public Enemy Number One.

So it is in the context of all this that one has to discuss the news which emerged yesterday that Bondì has been given a €54,000 package to act as a ‘strategic communications consultant’ to the very government he worked so very hard to see not elected. 

One would have to be very naive to think that Bondì had an overnight “conversion” because he had seen the Labour light - going from being an open supporter of the PN with his last minute stunt in the now infamous “tistghu tghiduli x’qed jigri hawnhekk?” episode on the eve of the 2013 elections, to sudden “silenzio stampa” mode after Muscat rode to victory. The clues of what was happening behind the scenes came in drips and drabs. First, Bondiplus went from being aired twice a week with numerous repeats, to just once weekly. 

Then, during the summer hiatus, it was announced that Lou had been appointed to the new Foundation for Maltese National Festivities throwing many Labour supporters into confusion, and understandable mounting anger. Of all people, why him, they demanded to know?

When the new television schedule was announced, we learned that Lou Bondì would no longer have a programme on TVM and any further attempts to draw him out on what had actually happened was met by the classic “No comment”.

With a typical, cynical Maltese shrug, we could all see that he had been “bought”, the only question which remained was simply “for how much?”

And now that we know the answer, what does this tell us? Well, I suppose the lesson we have learned is that not only does diehard belief in a political party fluctuate according to the number of Euros laid out on the table, but that many people simply take a pragmatic stock of a given situation and gravitate without a second’s thought towards whoever is in power.  (Just look at how everyone has been bailing on Simon Busuttil ever since the dismal MEP result - no one wants to be perceived as being on the losing team).

If Lou Bondì's appointment had only amounted to the measly sum of €2000 per annum as so many other board members on other boards have been given, eyebrows would not have been raised quite so high. If, despite the appointment, Bondì had continued being critical of Labour, whether on TV or online (he could have easily resurrected his blog), then he could have retained some vestige of his credibility. After all, giving advice on how to organize national festivities is hardly such a controversial post in itself.

But neither of these things happened did they? Instead, Muscat has his token Nationalist on board to ‘prove’ that he is willing to work with anyone and Bondì's voice has been effectively silenced from criticizing the Labour administration. Maltese politics is full of such examples of dark irony. After all those years that Sant spent railing and protesting against Bondiplus and after all those attempts at boycotts which backfired, deflating the whole thing turned out to be quite easy huh?  

And to think that all it took was 54k.