THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING

It's half-past midnight and all is well, for Joseph Muscat, in any event. He's come
up just a couple of votes short of getting an outright majority. Barring a
dignified withdrawal by George Abela, which is entirely on the cards given the
manner in which this gentleman conducts himself, Muscat is poised to become Leader
of the Malta Labour Party, though as yet not Leader of the Opposition, because they
still have to sort out who - if anyone - is going to make way for him in the House.


I say "if anyone" because I'm under this impression, utterly misguided as it may be,
that someone somewhere said that Muscat would be keeping his MEP seat. I can't
believe that he would show such contempt of the country, so I must be labouring
under the wrong impression. In fact, a swift Google didn't bring anything of the
sort up, so there's an end to it: the Oracle has spoken.

Well, you have to admit I called it pretty darn close, don't you? I got Coleiro
Preca and Bartolo in the wrong order, but I was accurate enough in predicting a
pretty miserable showing by both of them and I had Falzon in third place, which is
precisely where he figured. That Report sure worked, though, because he got a
pronouncedly low quota of votes, considering he is a former Deputy Leader and the
brains behind the electoral effort, up to a point.

The point at which his brains stopped being used, incidentally, was the point when
Labour started to get ploughed, which didn't stop fingers being pointed at Falzon,
with the result he got on Thursday being evidence of that.

George Abela fetched up second and The Anointed One, The Special One, The
Wunderkind, soared above them all, just failing to get through in the first round
by, what, 3 votes was it? Something like that.
So my precociously prescient prediction practically proved to be of premiership
probity, when I reported that the smart money was on Muscat getting in straight off.

It will take a polling miracle of epic proportions for Abela to unseat Muscat now.
All the people who voted for Bartolo, Coleiro Preca and Falzon (not too many in the
case of the first two, but quite a few in the case of Falzon) would have to vote for
Abela and the chances of that happening are about as much as Sant admitting that he
was ever wrong about anything.

So there you have it. The guy who, according to some reports, had said he wouldn't
ever contest a local election is poised to take up an office which demands that he
does exactly that. Given that this is a bloke who campaigned mightily to keep Malta
out of the EU and then promptly sought to get elected (and actually got elected) to
the European Parliament, this minor inconsistency probably won't worry him. Since
when has inconsistency worried any politician, anyway?

One can't help but goggle at the marvellous workings of the collective Labour mind,
though. It's as if the sheer, stark fact of Sant's leadership never existed at
all. The Maltese electorate has consistently rejected a Labour Party led by a
euro-sceptic, technocratic, relatively youthful economist who seemed to delight in
jabbing the re-set button of his computer when playing around with our lives.

So what does the Labour Party elect, the euro-sceptic, technocratic, relatively
youthful economist having taken his leave? Yep, that's right, it elects as Leader
a euro-sceptic, technocratic, actually youthful economist, with a track record that
demonstrates that he has no problem with saying one thing ("I wouldn't contest an
election") and doing another (having to contest an election, presumably, when he
leads the MLP into the elections in five years' time)

When you think that the delegates had available to them a candidate who could only
have gained them votes, you really have to shake your head in awe.

Think about it. The MLP got within a whisker of getting in last March. They failed
(yet again) because of the way they are perceived by enough of the electorate to
make them unelectable. Abela would have appealed to that segment of the electorate
which would have swung the balance. It's always been pretty obvious to me that if
the MLP had told Sant to take a long walk on a short pier after the EU Referendum
and appointed Abela to lead, the Nationalists wouldn't even have bothered to call an
election. They'd have just handed the keys to Castille to him and told him to get
on with it.

The MLP had the chance to remedy that fundamental error last night.

Did they? Did they 'eck! A campaign characterised by shove after shove after
shove in favour of Muscat by the party machine, both here and abroad, with nasty
little whispers about the opposing candidates surfacing in the comments sections
from time to time, culminated in the young gentleman being, as of 01:05 on Friday,
as I put the finishing touches to this piece, on the brink of taking up the legacy
left him by Sant.

As they say, though the fat lady hasn't sung, she's limbering up her tonsils as I
write. George Abela, I have to imagine, has spent a couple of minutes weighing up
the odds of every single man-jack and woman less two who voted for the other three
voting for him on Friday evening. Being a realist, he no doubt came to the obvious
conclusion and has gone to sleep, serene in the knowledge that he had a good product
on offer and it was no fault of his that the delegates failed to take it up. The
MLP's enormous loss is, to be honest, his gain: to misquote Marx, would you want to
lead a party which has those members in it?

In a way, I suppose I should be thankful, as Muscat will give me more grist for my
mill than Abela would have, but in another way, the prospect of a preciously
precocious prince proudly preening fills me with an almost crushing "good heavens,
more of the flipping same" feeling of ennui.

Still, no doubt I'll get over it.