Recipe for failure: Part I

Superficially, most people just flag up two words when they - as prototype Nationalists - said that they 'secretively' voted for the Labour party.

They state that they couldn't stand the arrogance within the party anymore... and that they didn't like Lawrence Gonzi.

I have to say that I recognise that line of thinking.

All throughout the past nine years I have insisted that Lawrence Gonzi was not the man many thought he was. I found him to be a hopeless administrator, conservative, dishonest, self-centred and ruthless.

I had argued that he was a very fortunate politician who had grown in the shadows of a far larger politician and that he faced a weak opposition led by a mediocre leadership.

That leadership had a name: 'Alfred Sant'. And when Sant lost one election in 1998 and then another in 2003, he decided to hang on, and instead of being unceremoniously asked to leave by his party, he was kept on to face yet another defeat in 2008.

In 2003 it was sexy to be pro-Europe. Alfred Sant did the exact opposite, and unleashed his own particular vision onto the electorate. Nonetheless, the PN's drive to get into Europe was not a walk in the park. Labour, like the PN, has a solid voter base that has a tendency to not cross the border and change sides.

In 2004, Eddie Fenech Adami had already chosen his successor and he made it very clear then, as some of us had noticed. 

He pushed Lawrence Gonzi and his eminence grise the 'Cardinal' (Richard Cachia Caruana) and Joe Saliba to make sure that all the party structures were made available for Gonzi to succeed... and he did.

Cachia Caruana in particular had every reason to want Gonzi. His relations with John Dalli were not good, and it was clear that his political future with Dalli was bleak.

From the very first day of his election, Lawrence Gonzi did exactly the opposite of what he said he would do. His 'new way of doing politics' involved excluding all those in the Nationalist Party who had contested against him. The whole Dalli faction was either dealt with or kicked out of all the party clubs. 

In history we speak of genocide. In Gonzi's case it was 'Dallicide'.

Gonzi and his boys installed their ass-lickers in the party committees. But that apparently was not enough, and anyone who was remotely connected to John Dalli was replaced or side tracked. Those who conformed - such as Edwin Vassallo - were given a chance to reintegrate.

To ensure that the media was perfectly in tune with what was happening, the party employed their loyal ninja warriors. Within their ranks, there was Pierre Portelli and Gordon Pisani, on the outside - Andrew Borg Cardona, Ivan Camilleri, the Queen of  Bile and of course Lou Bondi.

Bondi in particular was unleashed on PBS and for nine solid years he relentlessly attacked John Dalli or anyone related to him.

In Gonzi's first years as Prime Minister, the whole idea of a transparent government was thrown out of the window. George Pullicino was allowed to come up with the Outside Development Schemes, a horrendous and scandalous zoning system which I have no doubt was construed with specific electoral aims and results in mind.

Edgar Galea Curmi and Alan Caruana - from Tonio Fenech's stable - were involved in a plethora of direct orders at Mater Dei and elsewhere, which caught the attention of the auditor general and the media, but which did nothing to attract the PM's attention - on the contrary, the PM defended the indefensible.

Elsewhere, the exclusivity game was perfected by that perfunctory and distasteful character Alan Camilleri, the PM's spokesman who, amongst other things, implemented an advertising boycott system against this newspaper.

But worse still: in 2004 and until 2008, Gonzi paved the way for the worst form of Mintoffian-style politics ever. He continued to believe in appointments based on political patronage, he continued to ignore the signs that some of his ministers were acting independently and without a bigger picture in mind.

Even worse, he blessed his personal assistant's (Edgar Galea Curmi) style of spin-doctoring which led to serious attempts to influence the media. But his approach to the media was so sloppy that he was simply not respected, and neither was he taken seriously.

One good example was the oil scandal that has its roots in 2004 - when he was serving as prime minister and when it was very clear at the time that the choice of chairman Tancred Tabone was questionable and that the people involved in the bunkering business highly mistrusted the choice of people within Enemalta, especially the man appointed by Tabone - Frank Sammut.

Businessmen from B'Kara who were close to Tonio Fenech had indicated this, and the message had definitely been relayed somehow to the prime minister.

That was before 2008 and in that year, the Nationalist Party won the election by a very slim majority of 1,600 votes, as was made clear by an MT survey conducted around that time, which the prime minister had tried to convince us not to publish.

The writing was on the wall, but instead of responding, the party went into a mental state of 'we are invincible'.

Gonzi won the 2008 election because they used the services of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, who presented himself as some kind of victim on the Mistra affair.

On the eve of the election, Pullicino Orlando's involvement in the Mistra case was presented and publicised by Alfred Sant on TVM, albeit too late. It was too late for Labour to bounce back, but it was not too late for the Nationalist Party to realise that they had a time bomb that could have imploded and lost them the election.

What happened next in the second part of Gonzi's administration were two things.

The first was a internecine war within the party to destroy JPO and face the rebels and quash them, and the second was a belief that the Nationalist Party had a divine right to rule for ever.

The first part led to a hypocritical attempt to push Pullicino Orlando out of his seat. The attacks were ferocious and coordinated. But JPO somehow fought back and cunningly sought to deviate public attention from his Mistra woes by campaigning directly against projects which were the brainchild of Richard Cachia Caruana.

The project to build an underground museum under St John's Co-Cathedral led to the support of Astrid Vella - a green warrior who at the time was considered to be a very serious lobby. 

When the media did the job for JPO and Gonzi retreated and decided to bend over backwards to stop the project, JPO paused and then turned to his biggest campaign ever.

It would serve to distract, at least momentarily, from the memories of people the Mistra affair. It would also unknowingly let loose the social revolution that was waiting to happen in Malta and, secondly, it would rock the foundations that governed the Nationalist Party's conservative policies and sideline the Church forever.

It was the campaign for the introduction of divorce.

This was the beginning of the end for Gonzi.