Labour/EU: the Ultimate Romantic Comedy…

Ah, well. I guess that just about wraps up Labour’s brief love affair with the European Union. Not with a bang, but… well, let’s just say with a little sulky grumbling in the corner. Just like all great love stories are doomed to eventually fizzle out, I suppose…

Not that you’d ever realise that from classic Romantic Comedies, of course. Oh no: those tend to always have ‘happy endings’. There’s a reason for this, too. If you take the standard Romantic Comedy formula – which, more than any other genre, is always exactly the same – you will notice the film always ‘ends’  just as the real ‘love story’ is about to begin. 

Take ‘Notting Hill’, for example. Even if you accept the premise that a penniless shopkeeper from central London would end up marrying a world famous celebrity actress like Julia Roberts (unlikely at the best of times, just imagine when it’s Hugh Grant); do you remember how the film ends? (Spoiler alert: If not, skip the next two paragraphs. I wouldn’t want to ruin the earth-shattering surprise for you…)

It ends with only one wedding and no funerals… and in the very last scene, we even get a brief glimpse of the unlikely lovers’ future married life: Hugh Grant reading a book on a bench in Hyde Park, with Julia Robert resting her head on his lap… while their toddler infant plays happily on the grass.

See what I mean? We never get to see all the arguments over whose turn it was to bottle-feed the little brat that night; or change his diapers, or order the delivery pizza, or take out the garbage. Nothing of the kind. Like all romantic comedies, ‘Notting Hill‘ very arbitrarily comes a sudden halt, just before the story finally starts to get interesting. 

So if the Great Gushing Love Affair that briefly blossomed between the Labour Party and the European Union ever gets turned into a movie – as well it should – you can rest assured it wouldn’t end with the slow, acrimonious break-up we are currently witnessing today: the daily bitching about who shows whom more ‘solidarity’; whose record of good governance is more atrocious, and who’s being used by whom, for what political end… mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble, sulk.

No, it would almost certainly end with that dashing moment – just a few months ago - when Joseph Muscat proudly described Malta’s EU membership as ‘the best thing since sliced bread’. Given everything he and his party had previously said about the same EU... that’s the equivalent of the final onscreen kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in ‘From Here to Eternity’. You can almost hear the waves crashing in around them, as the two lovers roll around passionately in the sand…

And for a while it really did seem like a match made in Hollywood. No sooner did Muscat warble his serenade under the EU’s balcony, than out popped Donald Tusk – President of the European Council – to declare that Malta would be the perfect place to host the latest EU summit. Just like that glimpse of future marital bliss in Notting Hill: everything will be hunky dory from now on. All past mishaps – like that moment when Alfred Sant accidentally spilt his orange juice all over the EU’s blouse … wait, or was that Hugh Grant accusing Julia Roberts of having bombed Malta in World War II? Whatever: all past clashes and conflicts fade instantly, as soon as Cupid’s little arrow finds its mark. 

What a great movie ending, too. How closely it adheres to the classic formula. Sticking with the Julia Roberts theme, it reminds me of another film of hers: ‘The Wedding Planner’, in which she has to organise the wedding of her own first love to the redoubtable Cameron Diaz (before deciding, of course, that she’d rather marry him herself).

Admittedly, the Labour Party had a slightly less radiant rival to originally contend with: but it remains a fact that, like Julia Robert’s love interest in that film, the EU was actually betrothed to the Nationalist Party at the time…. and like Diaz, the PN proved insanely jealous and possessive of its fiancé.

This sets the scene for our first act, which was lifted straight out of the ‘How to Write a Romantic Comedy’ manual, chapter one. Initially, the relationship develops along purely antipathetic and antagonistic lines. Like D’Arcy and Elizabeth in ’Pride and Prejudice’ (the great grandmother of the entire genre), Labour and the EU rubbed each other the wrong way when they first met in the early 1990s. 

At the time, we all thought – well, I did, at any rate – that the hostility was genuine: that when Labour Party leader Alfred Sant said “God Forbid we join” before 2003... he actually meant it. Ah, but we didn’t realise it was a romantic comedy at the time. And with hindsight: how mightily deceived we were, not to work out that Alfred Sant – like Heathcliff before him – had been driven to such destructive malice, precisely because the object of his passion had rejected him for another!

Yes, yes, it all makes sense now. It’s that ‘crazy little thing called love’, up to its old tricks again. By which time – having placed our two lovers at the polar extremities of insurmountable obstacles – we must find a way to unite them. Otherwise, we couldn’t have a second act… and what would become of our classic ‘three-act structure’ then, aye?

To jump from “God forbid we ever join” directly to “joining is the best thing we ever did as a nation” – both actual quotes from leaders of the same political party, please note – would be to miss out on the all-important ‘turning point’: i.e. that sudden moment when the Labour Party itself realised it was truly, deeply, madly in love with the EU… and why.

It is this plot twist that gives our love story its truly epic status, right up there with Casablanca and Gone With The Wind. Let other, lesser romantic heroes be dazzled by beauty, or struck dumb by eloquence or charm. In this movie, the Labour Party learnt to love the EU for a far more romantic reason.

Convenience. There finally came a moment when the Labour Party understood that its naked aggression towards the EU had caused it far more harm than good. And that its own anti-EU stance was the biggest weapon in the Nationalist Party’s arsenal.

Strategically then, it also realised that reversing this attitude would also rob the PN of what, by 2008, had become practically its only campaign tactic. And following this deeply passionate train of cold, calculating logic, one can easily deduce that Labour would only profit from turning the detested EU into the object of its own affections. 

Ah, the things we do when blinded by indescribable passion! But now we are in our third and final act: the resolution. Changing one’s own feelings (however cynically) is one thing: ‘getting the girl’ is something else altogether. For that to work, the EU itself would have to play ball… to make some show of reciprocating at least part of the sentiment.

It happened slowly at first, but what began as a trickle of generally ‘good news’ from vaguely ‘European’ sources – the odd Moody’s upgrade here, the odd EU-financed project there – soon became a flood of ‘positive reports’: each gleefully paraded on the Labour media, like tokens from a distant, unattainable love.

But no classic romantic comedy would be complete without a final confrontation between the two competing lovers. The Nationalist Party – which evidently still considers the EU to be not only its first and only love, but also its own private property – was never going to take this challenge lying down.

And having been so snug together between the sheets for so many years– don’t forget how this movie started: they were engaged to be married, for Hugh’s sake – it wasn’t long before the jealous and possessive partner fought back.

Patiently, issue by issue, the PN started mobilising its EPP partners to vote against Malta at every turn… forgetting in its zeal that it is actually the entire country’s name – and not just Labour’s - that gets dragged through the muck in the process. A bit like Meg Ryan in ‘Addicted To Love’, come to think of it. If you missed this one, it was panned by critics for glorifying “calculated, obsessive, relentless destruction” in the name of “drastic, irrational revenge”.

It was just as this complicated love triangle was at its sneakiest and most brutal – shortly after the rejection of Toni Abela for the European Court of Auditors – that the masks finally came off:  when Muscat made his most gushing public overtures, and the EU seemingly showered us with blessings from afar. That is also why the movie version would have to end there: i.e. a couple of months ago… before this budding romance had time to wither and choke to death in the dust.

Personally, I’m a bit of a sucker for happy endings … so I think I prefer the movie version, on the whole. A real ‘happy ending’, of course, would entail Maltese politics somehow evolving beyond the basic storyline of a cheesy romantic comedy…. but that would drift into realm of Science Fiction/Fantasy genre… and I can only handle one movie genre at a time.