The Mistra soap opera

The recent general election continues to offer unexpected melodrama. As a student of politics for over 50 years, I find the ongoing reverberations of the Mistra Bay issue thoroughly absorbing. Judging by the amount of media coverage and the many comments I am hearing from my Maltese friends, the Mistra affair does seem to be assuming the proportions of a Maltese soap opera.

Day by day the fascination grows as new characters are introduced to the awaiting audience. Tuesday, a former special consultant; Wednesday, a party general secretary; Thursday, the Mepa auditor; and doubtless others waiting in the wings. It seems to have all the indications of becoming a Maltese epic. Personally, I can barely wait for the next instalment, and ultimately, of course, the denouement. Will Prospero prevail? Will Caliban come through? Will life on these enchanting islands ever be the same?

However, in the meantime, as an uninvolved, but totally bemused observer, several points puzzle me, though perhaps like Winnie the Pooh, I am a bear of little brain.

1. Mepa. In my experience of any such governmental/public committees not only were all members rigorously vetted on appointment, but at the beginning of each meeting every member had to declare and have minuted any interest, however small, in the business under discussion. Does this happen? For surely without such structural openness and probity, it seems rather like putting the foxes in charge of the chicken coop.

2. From the report on March 26: "It seems to me that the Labour Party did not have a strategy," he (the secretary general of the Nationalist Party) said. "They found a card in the end, and at that stage Alfred Sant didn't have the proof that what he was saying was the case. This is a fact and I didn't want the party to lose the election or risk losing the election against a party that did not have a strategy, but only resorted to mudslinging... Today, retrospectively, I would do the same thing because the Labour Party did not deserve to win the election without a strategy... My job was to see to it that... together with others, we won the general election."

Assuming that the reported quotation used in your report is an accurate representation of what the PN general secretary said, does it mean what I perceive it appears to mean? Namely, that come what may, winning the election came before all else? Or in other words, that the PN election victory was a greater good, ultimately transcending public probity and integrity, indeed, even morality itself? I sincerely hope that I am wrong in my understanding of what the secretary general of the PN is reported to have said within the context of the Mistra Bay issue.

My sincere hope is that for the benefit of all the people of Malta, indeed, for democracy itself, The Times will continue to cover this fundamental issue of public probity in the objective and open manner it has pursued hitherto.

Finally, may I commend to all participants in this gripping drama, Denis Healey's dictum, "When you are in the hole, it is time to stop digging!"