Setting the cuckoo-clock model right

I stand corrected regarding some loose expression in my "Tinker Tailor" Talking Point (August 20) by Andre Rizzo, writing from Brussels (August 25), and by the foreign minister in today's letters page. It will not, of course, be the Malta-nominated EU commissioner who will to and fro between Brussels and Malta every week in cuckoo-clock mode set for Fridays and Tuesdays. The cuckoo will be Malta's permanent representative in Brussels.

Such an odd way of fulfilling that function was supposedly selected because, said the foreign minister when he unveiled it, it was already tried and tested, though simultaneously the minister claimed it had been tailor made for Malta - a tinker-tailor bit he does not repeat in his letter. It would be useful, in the absence of any real proof by the government to back its assertion that it is right, if someone who can take a really detached expert view of how to handle Malta's new reality within an EU structure, were also to comment on that model.

The real reasons for the Always-on-Friday-and-Tuesday cuckoo-clock schedule announced and defended by the foreign minister should be discernible when the permanent representative is formally appointed. The cost and effectiveness of the "tailor-made" one-foot-there, one-foot-here model fashioned from tinkering with tried and tested examples referred to but not identified by the foreign minister, and now ignored by him, can be closely fully scrutinised when the hybrid model starts working.

Meanwhile, if the model looks like a cuckoo one does not have to wait until it actually chirps like a cuckoo to point that out, though of course the cuckoo should be described correctly.

Mr Rizzo and the minister summarised the role of EU commissioners. It is, in the words of the former, to safeguard the interests of the Union, by making sure the EU member states implement the treaties and legislative instruments that flow from them. That is the dry bureaucratic aspect of the role. To use it to assert that EU commissioners neither brief the governments of the countries they come from nor do they execute "political work" (as I had indicated) on their country's behalf presumes that that those who become commissioners don a garb impermeable to reality, a queer conclusion also implicit in the foreign minister's letter.

The reality context of the Commission's work is political. Commissioners, once appointed, do not shed their national identity to put on a habit that shrouds them away from the political jostling that goes on continuously as each member country tries to protect its particular interest and to get the best going deal for itself. While the bureaucratic service commitment of commissioners is to the Commission, which is of the whole Union, they do not, thereby, ignore their own country, or distance themselves totally from its political leaders, although they will not be slavishly in agreement with their expectations and stand. Experience within the union over the years amply bears that out.

Were the commissioner selected from Malta to castrate himself of his national identity to go solely by the bureaucratic book, the negotiating stance in the membership discussions on the appointment of commissioners would have been a waste of time. We would have simply ensured a good job for a Maltese national, though not one replete with mysterious strength as that of a clockworking political representative in Brussels who also retains his power base and levers in Malta.

The foreign minister does not think that, as I wrote, civil society and commentators did not applaud the model put forward by me, (and) that they lambasted it - ... "obviously" - he adds for partisan colour, "other than for the MLP". He asks me to enlighten him.

If he is not aware that there is strong apolitical criticism of the model he put forward - which I do not quite believe is his own inspired creation - the minister cannot be circulating much outside his office. Worse still, neither is he getting undiluted feedback. Incidentally, might I ask him to enlighten the public who applauded the very deliberately tinker-tailored toing-and-froing model?