Short of streaking across the match during the Italy-England match this evening or engaging in a tussle with Mario Balotelli, there is little Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando can do to recreate the stir his little stunt has caused.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando can puff up like a bantam cock and pontificate about the importance of Parliament from now till kingdom come, but nobody’s buying it- Claire Bonello

By voting with the Labour opposition and bringing about Richard Cachia Caruana’s resignation from the post of ambassador to the EU, Pullicino Orlando momentarily managed to recapture the limelight he so desperately craves. It’s patently obvious that his vote was based on personal, not political, motivations. Of course it was.

Pullicino Orlando can puff up like a bantam cock and pontificate about the importance of Parliament from now till kingdom come but nobody’s buying it.

The fact is that most people only have a very hazy idea as to what the whole Partnership for Peace brouhaha involved.

While a few may place Cachia Caruana as some scheming, puppetmaster or the power behind the Gonzi throne, they would be hard-pressed to explain what exactly he did wrong. The whole issue hardly registered on the public radar, and Pullicino Orlando can jump up and down in a Rumpeltstiltskin-like frenzy to persuade us otherwise but it just won’t wash. As the saying goes, “Revenge is a dish best served cold”, and we can see who’s enjoying his helping right now.

Still, Cachia Caruana is partially to blame for the current state of affairs. Not because of his role in the Partnership for Peace business where his actions were above board and in keeping with his position. He is quite blameless in that regard. The seeds of this particular debacle were sown back in 2008 by Cachia Caruana himself together with a select group of people who serve as spinners for the Nationalist Party.

Before the 2008 election Alfred Sant had got wind of the fact that Pullicino Orlando would be raking thousands of euros if a developer managed to get a permit to set up an open air disco at Mistra Bay – a protected site. Knowing that Sant was about to drop this bombshell, sullying the PN’s already questionable green credentials and hurting the party’s chances of success at the polls, a small nucleus of people sprung into damage limitation mode.

In an exercise presided over by Cachia Caruana and former PN general secretary Joe Saliba, the quasi-hysterical Pullicino Orlando was hand-held and led through those tense days. In keeping with one of the most basic tenets of public relations strategy of releasing information which could be damaging to your case, before your opponent does, an article entitled ‘Street Corner Gossip’ was published in the newspapers.

While purporting to be an up-front account of Pullicino Orlando’s blamelessness, the article tiptoed round the points at issue – namely the fact that he would stand to benefit big time if the relevant permit was issued.

The article bore Pullicino Orlando’s name, but I am morally convinced that it was ghost written for him by someone who has turned into his fiercest detractor. Peppi Azzopardi took time off from his busy schedule to pack in some covert coaching for the stricken MP on how to tell the truth.

And of course there was pseudo-showdown at PBS where a wound up Pullicino Orlando puffed up with wounded innocence faced Sant in what is considered to be the defining moment of the 2008 election.

The MP later testified that in all this he was following the instructions of Cachia Caruana and Saliba to the letter.

And this is where the seeds of future discord were sown. It is highly unlikely that people as astute and highly competent as Cachia Caruana and Saliba were completely unaware of the extent of Pullicino Orlando’s involvement in the Mistra affair. I find it hard to believe they didn’t grill him to elicit all the relevant information.

They may have operated a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach, but that would be a questionable basis for the spirited defence and the wholehearted backing given to him by the party and spinners. However I don’t buy the wilful ignorance theory.

The most plausible scenario is one where the puppet masters had a very good idea of what Pullicino Orlando was up to, but still chose to back him and present him to the electorate as some unfairly wronged martyr.

The trouble with this kind of approach – where you glorify people who should be dropped – is that it backfires quite spectacularly.

If Cachia Caruana and the other people involved knew what kind of person Pullicino Orlando was (and I find it hard to believe they had no inkling) and still chose to put him across as a valid candidate and representative of the people, they have only themselves to blame if he now tries to bring them down.

Perhaps they thought that the end (a PN electoral victory) justified the means (backing Pullicino Orlando). The current state of affairs is a manifestation of how utterly wrong they were.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt