Don’t mention the leadership crisis…

No doubt many here will be familiar with the classic episode of Fawlty Towers called ‘The Germans’. It’s the one in which hotelier Basil Fawlty (i.e, John Cleese) keeps frantically repeating to his staff the immortal words: “Don’t mention the war”.

Even if you haven’t watched it, you might be able to guess how the comedy unfolds. In the end it is Fawlty himself (aided by a concussion) who proves incapable of talking about anything but the war in front of his German guests. For instance, when taking their breakfast order: “So, that’s two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering, and four Colditz salads…” Or my own personal favourite:

Basil: Is there something wrong?

German: Will you stop talking about the war?

Basil: Me! You started it!

German: We did not start it!

Basil: Yes you did – you invaded Poland!

Naturally I don’t intend to ruin the comedy by deconstructing it, but part of what made that episode so memorable is the fact that it latches onto a situation all of us, at one point or other, will have experienced. The more of an effort one makes to avoid talking about a particular topic, the greater the likelihood that one will end up mentioning it by accident. You don’t have to be a psychologist to figure out why, either. Making that effort means the subject is already imprinted in your mind… and it is in the nature of human communication to let slip what is on one’s mind in purely involuntary ways.

But this is not the only way in which one’s mind involuntarily reveals what it doesn’t want to talk about. Another symptom involves talking incessantly about a great many other topics – including some rather unlikely ones – in order to divert attention from the one you are trying to avoid. And I need hardly add that this doesn’t take place only in little family-run hotels in Torquay.

In recent weeks, for instance, I have noticed a growing loquacity among members of the Nationalist Party involving a great many issues and incidents of the sort most ordinary political parties do not even bother with… largely because they are not, in themselves, matters of political concern.

The most recent example concerned an isolated incident in which a four-year-old boy ‘escaped’ from summer school, crossed two main roads, and eventually had to be escorted to the nearest police station by a concerned member of the public.

A “shocking case”, Nationalist MP Joe Cassar immediately declared, which “was the result of bad administration which had marred Skolasajf from day one this summer”.

Hm. Ok, I suppose that – of all people – the man who was responsible for Mater Dei Hospital for so long should know a thing or two about ‘shocking cases’ caused by ‘bad management’. But at the same time, I was unaware that ‘little children running away from kindergarten’ was so unheard-of a phenomenon that it actually had the power to ‘shock’.

As it happens, I myself ran away from kindergarten when I was around four. I had a good reason to make that bold bid for freedom, mind you. One of the other pupils was trying to run me over with a toy tractor. To a four-year-old child, that’s a life-or-death concern. I was more scared of that kid on the tractor than of any number of cars on the streets… and with good reason, too. There were hardly any at the time.

Is it possible, though, that myself and that child who repeated my exploit some 40 years later are the only two kindergarten pupils in history to have made a dash for it at the first opportunity? Is it so rare an occurrence that political parties would take time out of their busy schedule to issue statements about it?

Well, that certainly didn’t happen in my case. There were, after all, other more pressing matters for political parties to contend with in the mid-1970s. And this in turn constitutes the first of many tell-tale signs that the PN is emulating Basil Fawlty in his desperate bid to divert attention from a topic they don’t want us to talk about. And in case you haven’t already spotted it, Cassar himself helpfully points us in the right direction.  

This ‘shocking case’, he said, “should place the focus on safety and security in schools, without involving politics”.

Erm… ye-e-es, but who, exactly, is the one actually involving politics here? As Basil Fawlty asked his German guests all those years ago: who started it, anyway?

And there you have it. By Cassar’s own argument, this is not an issue for politicians to get tangled up in. It is an internal matter for the school administration, and the only parties directly involved are the parents, teachers, headmistress, etc. Yet there the politicians are, greedily seizing upon such a patently apolitical event for a little good-old fashioned political posturing. All of which raises the question: so what issue, exactly, are they trying to blot out of the public’s view this time?

Nor is this the only example. In recent months and weeks, former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi has occasionally emerged from a longish period of (entirely understandable) silence to air his views on a few local concerns. OK, I know what you’re probably thinking: Gonzi is no longer actively involved in politics, so why don’t I just give the guy a break?

Under normal circumstances I would agree… in fact, I have given him a break since the election. But circumstances within the PN are not exactly ‘normal’ at the moment, and Gonzi himself (though everyone seems to have forgotten this) is directly responsible for them.

This is, in fact, the entire crux of the matter. Given the sheer number of things that should be of particular concern to him at the moment – and which he should be explaining to us, as the man who ultimately dismantled the Nationalist Party – I found his choice of subject-matter rather strange.

In one case, Gonzi wrote an article in The Times in which he argued that the recent civil unions bill was ‘evidence’ that “abortion was a possibility under this Labour government”. Ah yes, of course. If you’re going to choose an artificial smokescreen, why not choose the most obvious and artificial of them all? Recent history shows that there is no better way to distract an entire country than to mention the one word that instantly elicits mass hysteria on a nationwide scale… and yet is also about the only issue upon which all three parties actually agree. 

This was, incidentally, entirely consistent with Gonzi’s entire tenure of office as prime minister. As I recall, he had spent the first three of his 10 years in that role talking of precious little apart from abortion. He had launched an entire crusade to have the abortion ban entrenched in the Constitution, remember?

Abortion, abortion, abortion: a strategy which very successfully kept us all from discussing virtually anything else all that time… such as, for instance, the energy sector, or the various allegations of corruption, nepotism and maladministration that eventually brought his government down.

Next up, Gonzi gave a little interview on Radio 101 earlier this month. I can’t quite explain what it was he actually talked about, because I quite frankly didn’t understand a word. This is a verbatim quote: “In Malta, if you have €1 million you can buy citizenship, but if you come here penniless on a dinghy, you will be treated as a criminal…”

I assume, therefore, that people coming here by dinghy were never treated as criminals throughout the 10 years Lawrence Gonzi was prime minister. No immigrant was ever arbitrarily detained. None was ever escorted to hospital in handcuffs. None was ever beaten by riot police while protesting against the conditions of their incarceration. For let’s face it: if something is nasty, ugly and doesn’t look very democratic, well, it can only take place under Labour…

I could go on about the sheer hypocrisy in that single sentence alone, but that would be to miss the point. What both these utterances have in common – all three, if you include Cassar’s statement on the ‘shocking’ case of the runaway kindergarten pupil – is that they are very obviously attempts to divert attention from the single topic that the Nationalist Party desperately wants to stop us all from talking about.

Yes, you guessed it: the horrendous financial mess left by Gonzi after 10 years studiously forgetting that he was, in fact, that party’s leader.

Lawrence Gonzi himself wants to distract us from this for pretty obvious reasons. The only alternative is to publicly take responsibility for reducing the once formidable PN to the equivalent of a homeless tramp begging passers-by for their loose change. No politician, active or inactive, will ever want to do that… though, paradoxically, he might gain some respect just by admitting his failures.

Elsewhere, Simon Busuttil – who to be fair is not directly responsible for the mess – has a different and arguably more pressing reason to avoid any mention of the elephant in the room. He knows that if the country’s attention turns to the PN’s woeful plight, it would expose the fact that his party is barely even a shadow of what it used to be, and as such is in no position to mount a challenge to the ruling Labour Party by the time the next election comes trundling along.

So they will talk about anything and everything – relevant or irrelevant, political or apolitical, shocking or simply daft – rather than confront the alarming reality that their own continued existence as a political party is now jeopardised by the failed leadership of the man they once tried to sell us as the only possible answer to all Malta’s problems.

Well, sorry to be a spoilsport but I can’t go along with this little game myself. The Nationalist Party’s internal problems are no longer exclusively the Nationalist Party’s business or prerogative. While the PN was busy engineering a debt rumoured to run into double-digit millions (the officially acknowledged figure is €8 million, which is bad enough anyway), the Labour Party successfully transformed itself from a serial loser of elections into a political behemoth that currently controls all major power nodes in the country, bar none.

And while – unlike the PN and its increasingly strident apologists – I acknowledge that it has transformed itself in other ways, too… it still remains the Labour Party, and a cursory glance at its political history is enough to suggest that too much power in its hands might not be a very good thing.

This in turn means that we need the Nationalist Party – or at least, another party to replace it – to counterbalance this laboratory-created political Godzilla.

Yet there they all are: trying to make mountains out of every molehill that comes their way, desperately trying to hide their dire straits behind whatever non-issue captures the public’s imagination at any moment… all in the hope that none of us would notice that the PN is actually in a state of suspended animation.

So how about I make a small suggestion? Now that Gonzi has crawled out of the woodwork once more to regale us with his views on civil unions, gay rights and the treatment of immigrants… i.e., anything but the monumental mess he left for others to clean up… how about giving us an explanation of how he managed to cause such an appalling disaster in the first place? How about answering some of the legitimate questions levelled at him as former party leader… not just by me (who am dust and ashes), but by people like Josie Muscat, who was an MP with that party for years, and recently expressed shock and outrage at the state it is currently in?

As for the rest of the party: how about actually admitting you have a problem which is affecting your credibility, and indicating what you’re going to do to solve it? Reason I ask is… well, talking about four-year-old fugitives and the phantom threat of abortion might successfully keep us all from discussing those problems for a few days or even weeks.

But it won’t make an €8 million debt go away; and it certainly won’t make the PN any more electable in three and a half years’ time.