Think you're a tough guy, huh?

Ever since Joseph Muscat won the Labour leadership race in 2008, I’ve been trying to figure out who the heck he reminds me of.

There is something about the configuration of his facial features that I’ve seen somewhere before. Perhaps with a little more in the way of thin reddish curls on top of that shiny domed forehead … at least, more hair than he has left today… and perhaps with some variations to the individual features here and there.

But those quizzical blue eyes were familiar. So was his habit of raising his eyebrows, tilting his head backwards, and jutting out his chin when about to speak… with the effect that he ends up looking at his audience directly through his nose, with the whites of his eyes showing above the irises. 

That’s a pose I’ve often seen before… very Mussolini-like, and therefore (unsurprisingly) very popular with movie stars. In Muscat’s case, it also contributes to that trademark look of squeaky-clean innocence and sincerity that has (let’s face it) done him so many favours over the years. And those ruddy cheeks, too… just the type of cheeks your grandma would have so dearly loved to pinch…

For make no mistake: that ruddiness is not incidental. It’s an intrinsic component of ‘Brand Joseph’; I suspect he retains an entire army of make-up artists backstage, to ensure that his cheeks always shine with exactly the right lustre when the cameras start rolling…

In any case: it’s all so familiar. Perhaps not a dead ringer resemblance… but Muscat certainly looks like, or at least reminds me of, someone I know… even though, all these years later, I am still unable to put my finger on precisely whom. .

Until a point this week, when I found myself reading an article about an international conference on corruption in London. Joseph Muscat, as we all know, addressed this conference, and my eyes were drawn to the following quote:

“I lead a government where one of my ministers was mentioned in the Panama Papers. I had to take tough political decisions. The opposition criticizes me for not being too harsh, but I think I was hard enough. The easy thing to do would be to send someone junior, but I’m here instead to face the music…”

I suppose it would have been different had I actually heard him say the words. But reading them in print, I couldn’t help but try and imagine how they would sound with different accents.

“I had to take tough decisions…”

“I was hard enough…”

Maybe I watch too many movies, but those lines could easily have been lifted straight from any 1950s mobster film noir. So I went for the Bugs Bunny accent (later borrowed by Humphrey Bogart et al), which is a combination of Brooklyn drawl with typical Bronx abruptness – you know, the combination that pronounces ‘girl’ as ‘goyl’, and ‘coffee’ as ‘cor-fee’, etc.

And hey presto! Suddenly it all fell into place. Now I know exactly where I’d seen those ruddy cheeks and innocent blue eyes before… Nice Guy Eddie, from Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 classic Reservoir Dogs (I mean, ‘dawgs’)!

Then, in a flash, everything made perfect sense. It wasn’t merely that I had finally solved a mystery that had literally been driving me bananas for years… but Muscat’s entire game plan likewise swam into view with a clarity that almost took my breath away.

For (as I hope to illustrate soon) Muscat resembles Nice Guy Eddie in more than mere physical features alone. Like that marvellous character played by Chris Penn in that film, he also clearly misconstrues the meaning of the word ‘toughness’. And it is a word that I suddenly realise he uses a heck of a lot, too…

Like so many minor characters in a mobster movie, Joseph Muscat seems to think he’s ‘hard’. He is fond of imagining that he has a knack for taking ‘tough decisions’. Even when gainsaid by the media (which doesn’t actually happen all that often) he automatically falls back on more or less the exact same line quoted above.

This instance was no exception: challenged on the toughness of his decisions by MaltaToday, he reiterated: “They were not empty words. I did take action. Konrad Mizzi resigned from deputy leader and I stripped him of his portfolio, so I took action in his regard…”

Not only that: but Muscat talks as though he is the only person capable of being decisive in any given circumstance. Just look at how he carried on that same answer: “Empty words are those uttered by [PN leader] Simon Busuttil who didn’t speak about corruption under the previous administration, didn’t speak about the divorce issue and abstained on a vote to introduce civil unions…”

Now that’s what I call tough gangsta talkin’. Suck on that, ya hobos! I’ll show you what tough’s all about…

And it’s a good act, too. Heck, I’d pay seven euros to watch Muscat in the lead of a Tarantino movie any day. BUT… all this hard talk doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny, does it? Let’s start with the ‘music’ Muscat claims he had to face over Panamagate. What music was it, exactly? K-Billy’s ‘Super Sounds of the Seventies’? Urge Overkill singing Neil Diamond’s ‘Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon’…?

Reason I ask is that I sure haven’t heard anything resembling a soundtrack to this movie myself. Unless the expression ‘to face the music’ has somehow changed meaning while I wasn’t looking, I have seen no discernible way in which Muscat can be seen to have shouldered any responsibility whatsoever over the Panama Papers. On the contrary: Konrad Mizzi was the only serving European minister named in those papers… and, for all Joseph Muscat’s claims to have ‘faced the music’, he still is.

Which of course brings me to the ‘tough action’ the prime minister tells us all he took. What did he do, anyway? Did he strap his energy minister to a chair and threaten to slice his ear off with a razor? Did he stab him in the eye with a pen, like Joe Pesci in ‘Goodfellas’? Or did he at least slam the car door shut on his head a few times, like Vinnie Jones at the end of ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’?

Now THAT’s the sort of thing I understand by ‘tough action’, you know. That’s the sort of thing that gets you results…

But no: evidently, Muscat’s understanding of the word differs from mine. And just to give an indication of the sort of results his own version of ‘toughness’ actually delivered… last Wednesday – i.e., well over a week after being ‘demoted’ – Konrad Mizzi addressed the press to reveal that ‘Malta was on track to meet its renewal energy targets by 2020’.

And he said this while launching a new EU-funded scheme aimed at incentivising private investment in solar energy, too.

Erm… excuse me, but isn’t this the same Konrad Mizzi who has just been stripped of his energy portfolio? So what the heck is he doing making public announcements regarding new developments in the energy sector, for all the world as though…

…the ministry is still his?

And who knows? Perhaps it still is. For what is a ‘minister without portfolio’, anyway? At first I took it to mean that Muscat had nicked his wallet... which would have been a pretty nifty mobster thing to do, all things considered. But no: like ‘toughness’. ‘music’ and ‘demotion’, the word ‘portfolio’ seems to change meaning when uttered by Joseph Muscat.

In Mizzi’s case, it means the minister no longer has to worry about losing anything at all as a consequence of his Panama connections. He can continue to be energy minister, while at the same time not being energy minister. Simple, n’est-ce pas?

And all thanks to a couple of ‘tough decisions’ taken by Joseph Muscat…

Once again, that reminds me of the other way Muscat resembles Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs. Interestingly, in two hours of almost uninterrupted violence, Chris Penn’s character is about the only one who (not counting the final scene, where it’s actually unclear who shot whom) never kills or injures anyone at all. A lot of tough talk, certainly – mostly over the phone – but Nice Guy Eddie actually lives up to his nickname for most of the film.

Now: as for the really tough characters in that movie – Mr White, played by Harvey Keitel, or Mr Blond by Michael Madsen – well, their toughness is determined precisely by how little they talk and how much they act. Their attitude to ‘empty words’ in best summed up in a single line uttered by Marsden to Keitel: “Are you gonna bark all day little doggie? Or are you gonna bite?”

Or, even more aptly, to Nice Guy Eddie himself: ‘Eddie, you keep talking like a bitch, I’m gonna slap you like a bitch…”

THAT, dear prime minister, is what ‘toughness’ really sounds like. So off you go, and face some real music for a change. Here, if you like I can lend you a couple of baseball bats, a chainsaw, and this old knuckleduster someone left lying about…you never know, might come in handy…