Divorced from election realities

There were some who attributed unseemliness to the haste with which Deborah Schembri accepted Labour’s overtures for her to become a candidate for the election. Others even characterised this as evidence that she had ulterior motives underlying her campaign in favour of divorce, political ambition being her inspiration.

What twaddle: even if Dr Schembri did harbour political ambitions when she was campaigning for divorce, she kept them to herself and she never, as far as I can see, tried to play politics. She might have found herself starting to enjoy the contest, for that matter, and some way down the road began to see herself as a politician but, again, there was no evidence of this in her campaigning.

And what hasty unseemliness was there in accepting Labour’s invitation? If you’re asked out to dinner or to contest an election, you accept or decline and there’s an end to it and if your suitor is being a bit forward, or opportunistic, or chancing his arm or whatever, that’s his problem, not yours.

I wonder what the people who made those sort of comments online would have said if it had been the Nationalists who hadn’t sat on their hands and actually tried to be proactive in trying to dispel the idea that they’re intent on becoming the political arm of the Church of fundamental faith. Recruiting Dr Schembri would have been a coup and a half, you might think (or not), especially since the Nationalist Party seems to be having collective amnesia about why those of us with a liberal aversion to Big Brother telling us how to live our lives gravitated towards it in the first place.

Just to help the guys with a faulty memory, I’ll refer them to their own information director’s piece in this very newspaper last Wednesday.

But getting back to Dr Schembri, Labour candidate, one has to wonder whether she hasn’t grasped a poisoned chalice, really. Or, for that matter, whether Labour has fully thought through the whole thing, given that single-issue campaigners do not necessarily go on to prove themselves to be heavy hitters in the Big Game. Not that she’s of the same level as the clowns who chuck themselves into the fray because they’re popular telly personalities or some such vapidity, but there’s always the danger that being very, very good in one area will be seen as being not quite good enough in many others.

If Dr Schembri needs any evidence of what can happen to you in the political arena, all she has to do is consider the treatment meted out to Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca as soon as she came to be perceived as something of an inconvenience. MaltaToday can never be accused of being a mouthpiece for the Nationalists, if you’ll forgive me for that statement of the darned obvious, so the hatchet job performed on Ms Coleiro Preca, calling her an embarrassment to the Labour Party and to the anti-divorce campaign, was certainly not coming from the PN side of the political spectrum.

Since in the reality of things in Malta there are actually only two sides to the political spectrum, it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out whose fingerprints were on that particular story.

Whether or not Dr Schembri has any baggage that could be used to weigh down her campaign in due course I neither know nor care but she can rest assured that, even if she has none, some will be creatively created and not by her overt opponents either.

It is well known at the grass-roots level that you must watch your back for incoming daggers wielded by the people with whom you are competing for the relevant number one in your box, namely the people in your own party.

To be sure, and this is why Labour recruited her, Dr Schembri might attract traditionally non-Labour voters to give her their first preference, though I tend to doubt it, and she’s going to have to go head-to-head in her districts with candidates on the Labour side if she wants to make an impact. Without casting too many aspersions on anyone in particular, squeamishness and adherence to the Queensbury Rules are not characteristics that mark the weeks before an election and many candidates believe in getting their retaliation in first. Dr Schembri might find herself wondering what she’s let herself in for.

As it should have been if you enjoy a spot of rock, and as it was for me, Monday night’s destination was the amphitheatre at Buskett, where Xirka Rock 3 went down with a head-bang and then some. Excellent stuff, there’s no other way to describe it.

It’s summer, though the weather hasn’t actually figured that out completely, and, as a result, eating out with friends becomes even more of a trial of one’s fortitude in not overdoing it. As I have on occasion remarked, it’s a filthy job but someone has to do it.

Saturday saw us at Il Terrazzo in Xlendi for a breezy lunch, where location, location, location is matched by wholesomeness and friendly service. The evening was taken up strolling around Victoria (what the smart people call Rabat) for the various entertainments put on to mark the beginning of summer, which was fun, so on Sunday we were primed for lunch at the reopened after the winter break of Sicilia Bella in Mġarr, where standards have been retained, thankfully.

imbocca@gmail.com

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