Corruption, they cried

There was something eminently tragic about the way the medical selection board issue panned out for the Labour Party in the end. And like the best in classical tragedy, it was all so very predictable right from the start.

This can be traced to a MaltaToday article in April, which revealed that a certain Dr Robert Cuschieri - who turned out to be son-in-law to education minister Dolores Cristina - had been appointed designate consultant surgeon at Mater Dei Hospital... only for the position to be revoked by the Public Service Commission, after three doctors filed a judicial protest calling for the selection process to be annulled and re-launched.

The reason? Cuschieri had failed to satisfy one of the mandatory criteria: he had only been on the specialist register for three months, when the minimum period stipulated at law was two years.

It later emerged that he was one of a number of consultants whose appointments were all likewise questionable. In some cases the appointees did not even possess the necessary qualifications for the post. In others, they had no experience working in Malta (another mandatory requirement, according to rules drawn up by the Public Service Commission).

The appointments had been made by four selection boards, the names of whose constituent members were at the time not available to public scrutiny.

This was enough for the Labour Party to mount an offensive, and it fell to MP Helena Dalli to call for an investigation into the affair. The issue, Dalli declared, had "a whiff of corruption" about it: a gratuitous and rather unnecessary observation, which (with hindsight) the Labour Party may well come to seriously regret.

At the time, however, things did look a little on the fishy side. Government's initial response seemed at a glance to be panic-stricken. Health Minister Joe Cassar first argued that 'data protection issues' prevented the release of the names of the selection board members. But he was forced to sheepishly retract, after being publicly 'corrected' by the Data Protection Commissioner, who saw no reason why the names should be withheld.

Labour immediately seized on this to accuse government of having "something to hide" - and indeed it did, though not quite in the sense that the Labour Party expected - and called on the Ombudsman's health commissioner to investigate.

Once again, the investigation concluded that there was no reason not to publish the names of the selection boards... at which point, to all external appearances, Cassar seemed to have been outmanoeuvred by the Opposition on all fronts: forced, as it were, to release the names after unsuccessfully trying to keep them secret.

But lo and behold: sitting on one of the boards to which the Labour Party had attributed 'corrupt' motives was none other than the Labour Party's own 'star candidate' on the 13th district: ophthalmologist Franco Mercieca. And while he had no input in the short-lived decision to appoint Cuschieri as consultant, it seems that the board Mercieca formed part of was in fact responsible for one of the questionable appointments... making him 'guilty by association', as it were, of the 'corruption' previously sniffed out by Helena Dalli.

Suddenly, the tables were turned, sending the Labour Party into a tailspin. Evidence for the panic that must have ensued at Mile End includes the mysterious disappearance of an article on Maltastar - the Labour Party's electronic portal - which had originally appeared on 29 July under the headline 'PL demands investigation into the case of medical consultants'.

Curiously, the hyperlink still shows up in response to a Google search... but the article itself seems to have vanished, along with all other references to this embarrassing development. And considering that the decision to pursue such a danger-studded path was taken for strategic reasons by the Labour Party, the boomerang effect offered immediate campaign opportunities for a some good old-fashioned Nationalist spin.

It's all in the spin

Looking at the issue more closely, it turns out that the involvement of Franco Mercieca was less questionable than might at first appear. Of the appointments made by the four boards, it turns out that only three had been actually withdrawn... and these did not include the appointment in the opthalmology department (i.e., in which Mercieca was involved).

At the time when Helena Dalli cried 'corruption', there was in fact no direct reason to suspect any irregularity on Mercieca's part... although that would quickly change, as the spotlight cast on the issue by the Labour Party also revealed what Mercieca himself later described as a "grey area" in the selection process.

"At the time of the interview I raised the issue of ineligibility of one of the candidates as he was not on the specialist register," Mercieca later explained, after it turned out that he had not even objected in writing to the appointment, "but the chairman (Thomas Fenech) reiterated that the list of candidates to be interviewed was issued by the Public Service Commission and that we were obliged to assess these candidates and grade them according to their qualifications and abilities."

He later added that it was a "collective agreement", and not a unilateral decision to proceed with the interview.

"Having agreed on the proceedings with the chairman of the board none of us felt the need to forward a minority report or refrain from signing the interview result," he said.

Mercieca added, "After all, its up to the PSC to issue the Consultant appointment at its discretion after we assessed the candidates' professional abilities."

Unlike the other three consultancy appointments - all subsequently withdrawn over 'irregularities' - there appears at face value to have been no direct reason to suspect any foul play; and in fact the Nationalist response to Labour's gaffe was careful not to level the same corruption charge at Mercieca... with good reason, as the accusation would have to also be leveled at other members of the board; and besides, for the reasons outlined above it wouldn't really stick anyway.

But this is a small matter for the Nationalist Party, which still enjoyed the luxury of a bonanza of political points literally handed to them on a silver platter by the Opposition itself. Congenially, the entire incident seemed to  fit neatly within the mould of the PN's entire electoral strategy... which has so far aimed almost exclusively at undermining Joseph Muscat's 'progressive' image by instead projecting him as a gaffe-prone and largely incompetent "bungling amateur" (to use the words coined by Beppe Fenech Adami in a recent interview).

So rather than go to town with Mercieca's involvement in an exercise his own party labelled "corrupt", the PN spin machine chose a different (and, it must be said, more ingenious) tack. It limited itself only to exposing the Labour Party as a victim of its own clumsiness and political ineptitude... and this it did in three specific steps.

The first step was to underscore the lack of internal communication within party structures, resulting in an anomaly whereby the PL would be so blissfully unaware (or so it seems) of its own candidate's involvement in the issue, before deciding to bring out the big guns. And indeed it does remain something of a mystery, how Mercieca (who surely could see where all this was heading) failed to inform his own party of the possibility of embarrassment.

Step two was to accuse the PL of being ignorant of the precise procedures and selection criteria regarding medical consultants... thereby adding to existing perceptions of a party that talks too much and knows too little - not to mention that shoots from the hip, only to afterwards realize that it has accidentally shot itself in the foot.

This, by the way, is entirely in keeping with the PN's overall campaign strategy so far: we recently saw an almost identical (though less successful) attempt to saddle Joseph Muscat with the epithet "bigmouth", over the fact that he had inadvertently revealed Labour's Mistra strategy to Simon Busuttil before the election.

The third step is however the most revealing of all - though ironically it tells us infinitely more about the psychological state of the PN than about Labour.

In an innuendo-laden statement, the Nationalist Party attributed the gaffe to "internal dissent" within the PL... hinting that Franco Mercieca may even have been the victim of internal sabotage by a rival candidate hoping to trip him up in his traditionally cutthroat constituency (Gozo).

Naturally political parties of all hues (and at all times) have been susceptible to this sort of internal strife - and it is by no means inconceivable that the idea to pursue the medical appointments issue may have originated from a rival Gozo candidate within the same party.

But it is admittedly far-fetched... and as such it also betrays a telling impulse on the part of the PN to project its own endemic problems onto Labour.

For let's face it: if there is one party currently suffering intensely from problems such as "internal dissent" and "infighting", this would have to be the Nationalist Party, and not Labour at all. From the uppermost echelons (the Parliamentary group/Cabinet), all the way down to constituency level, all indications point heavily towards open warfare between PN exponents. It was internal dissent that cost Lawrence Gonzi his parliamentary majority, and rendered his government unable to effectively govern since around last November. And it was rivalry between candidates on the same district that resulted in the spontaneous combustion of the Sliema local council.

Similar turf wars sporadically erupt in Labour, too - the Fgura local council being a recent widely publicized example. But to claim, as the PN spin machine hinted this week, that the PL's "corruption" gaffe was engineered specifically to derail one of its own candidates really does come across as rather rich.

Still: in an election campaign where all indications seem outwardly to favour the Labour Party, the PN can surely be forgiven for claiming victory at least on this one issue.