With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Francis Farrugia, seconded by Victoria Grech, nominated me as Leader of the Malta Labour Party. It seems I've given the impression that I know what it takes to make a party electable.
I'm flattered and amused but not interested. To start with, I don't like the idea of having to wheel and deal in order to have a chance. Yes, I do know that I don't have a chance (duh) and that the people who "nominated" me were only being facetious, but the point stands. To be elected to any post of even the slightest consequence, toes have to be stepped on, to a greater or lesser degree, and I'm not into toe crunching, except of strikers when they have the temerity to try to get near to my goal in five-a-side (an entirely other story) The greater the position, the more vicious the tone crunching, and there are few greater positions than Leader of the Opposition.
And then there's the question of who I'd have to associate with in order to become Leader of the Malta Labour Party. I mean to say, I'd have to meet Jason Micallef, even if only to ask him why he's still around, and Charlon Gouder, to be asked what scandals I promise to unearth next time, in order to make sure that I alienate the voters yet again. There are plenty of excellent people I'd gladly work with in the Labour Party, these two not being two of them. To be fair to Gouder, as a journalist working for a political medium, it's hardly his fault he had to come across in the way he came across, but the point is that he seemed to relish the role.
Who in his right mind would want to join the list of Labour leaders, anyway? I mean to say, Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant, with the antipathy all of these attracted. More than half the country repeatedly voted them and their ideas down - a total of 7 times, which feels like seven times seven times. Many people I know have the urge to spit when the mention of these names recalls some episode in their own past, when harm was caused to them by a policy or the method of executing it. Some acts you don't want to follow because they're too tough to follow, others you don't want to follow because they're too lousy to follow: it's your choice why I wouldn't want to follow that lot.
Whoever does take the role on will have a big job to do and he or she will have to overcome many other difficulties apart from the ones I've glanced at. The biggest will be convincing the Party Delegates that the profile fits. I don't know many Party Delegates. The ones who I think are delegates are reasonable types but I suspect that they're in the minority, and anyway, I don't know them in "Delegate Mode". Consider, if you want to see what I mean, the difference between Michael Falzon in his real role and the same bloke on the podium, rousing the Lions of Change. The latter aberration wasn't the man's real character, but he was having to please the crowd and the delegates are - must be - the archetypical components of a Labour crowd.
Stop fussing
The little elves that spent an election campaign trying to make Labour's position less anathema to the right thinking amongst, happily without success, close run thing though it was, have been having paroxsyms of negativity about our rejoining the Partnership for Peace.
You'd have thought that after Sant's flirtation with the concept of partnership, these guys would be genuinely pleased, but in fact they're having a really good whine. For some strange reason, Labour's spokespeople, official or not, seem to have this notion that they had some sort of right to be consulted. I suppose in an ideal world, this would be the case, but in the real world, they're in opposition and since all they've done, consistently (about the only thing they've been consistent in) is oppose for the sake of opposing, what do they expect? That the Government would consult them or something? Why? In a "winner take all" democracy like ours, winning by one vote, one thousand votes or one hundred thousand votes is all the same, Sant's ludicrous notions about the dead voting notwithstanding.
Oh, sorry, I forgot, Sant's ludicrous notions have been taken up by the apologists for the AD too, now, which just means that they've become doubly ludicrous.
But to get back to the shock-horror reaction to our taking part in the PfP, it is clear, except to the terminally befuddled, that Malta will not be involved in military operations, but will be involved in training operations, joint exercises, humanitarian aid, search and rescue operations, and crisis management in natural disasters. Barring accidents, anyone who volunteers (note the word, volunteers) should be safe enough from the prospect of coming back to mommy in a body-bag. I'm not trying to make light of the idea of military men and women being killed or injured in the line of duty, though this is an occupational hazard par excellence, but to listen to the whiners, you'd think that the PM personally was busy sending the flower of our youth off to die in the trenches.
Come on people, grow up. This is what people in the military do, and they're not even going to be doing any fighting. And let's have less of this bleating about neutrality, while we're about it, too. It's a stupid notion, harking back to the even stupider foreign policy notions that people like Mintoff used to cook up every time he tried to play some brinkmanship.
And while we're about it, can we have less whining about Pullicino Orlando's case, now? As far as I'm concerned, if it is shown that he abused in any way, he should do the decent thing and slink off into the darkness. This idea being put about in certain quarters that this is exclusively a matter for him and his constituents is a bit naive, to my mind. Malta is a single constituency, in truth, and individual MPs are not more important than the Government as a whole, so if an MP made a mess, he has to clean it up.
But please, enough about this case already. If I see one more blog or letter or whatever from an MLP or AD elf feeling hard done by, there's a serious chance I'll up-chuck.