With the publication of Eddie Fenech Adami’s reminiscences, one word keeps being repeated, by the newspapers, as a measure of the man and his dominance of an entire political era: charisma. But there’s a problem with that word.

It sounds like an explanation when, in fact, it is a question.

Charisma can take many different forms. What kind was Fenech Adami’s? Why did it displace Dom Mintoff’s?

Let’s begin by putting aside a common understanding of charisma: personal attractiveness and the ability to hold attention in conversation. This is the charisma that self-help books claim to teach. It’s the sense in which the word was used to describe Mgr Paul Cremona when he was first consecrated archbishop by commentators who evidently found it extraordinary that a bishop could exude niceness and personal warmth.

In this sense of the word, however, Fenech Adami was a charisma consultant’s nightmare. I use the past tense because I’m referring to the former politician, not to the private man with his dry chuckle and light sense of humour.

The charisma consultant advises firm, lingering handshakes, a steady gaze in the eye and an appreciative nodding attention to small talk. Alas, Fenech Adami was notorious for beginning to withdraw his hand the moment he gave it to you, looking ahead to the next person he needed to greet before you even finished talking and speeding off. The reason he wasn’t even faster was because Mary Fenech Adami – the charisma consultant’s dream – slowed him down.

It didn’t matter because this kind of charisma – memorable likeability – is a pale shadow of real charisma, which is about commanding authority, not celebrity.

To say that a politician has charisma is to say that the source of his authority is himself. He personifies what he stands for. His requests are legitimate simply because it is he who has made them. He persuades in part because, if he’s making that particular argument, one is prepared to accept it even if with some misgivings.

The charismatic politician draws us out of ourselves. He educates us in the original sense of that term, which means to lead out and brings us to see ourselves in a way we did not before. We might even say that he reconfigures us if, thanks to and out of loyalty to him, we find ourselves doing things that we would otherwise never have dreamt of doing.

To say that a politician has charisma is to say that the source of his authority is himself. He personifies what he stands for

There’s no doubt that, in this sense, both Mintoff and Fenech Adami were charismatic. There are literally thousands of people ready to testify in this sense for the one or the other (or, in some cases, both).

The resemblance, however, stops there. To compare the charisma of one with that of the other is to embark on a stark contrast.

It’s easiest to begin with a curious fact. Both men have been mythologised.

With Mintoff, myth has tended to exaggerate his accomplishments outside politics (say, his academic record at Oxford).

With Fenech Adami, however, myth has actually downplayed them. For example, very few people seem to know that, before he became party leader, Fenech Adami was a partner in one of the very top law firms and a leading practitioner in civil law (and if they do know it, they wouldn’t quite know what to make of it).

This contrast is no coincidence. It goes to the heart of two different kinds of charismatic authority.

Mintoff’s charisma was that of the unstoppable force. It was built on a claim to know more and better – whether on how to govern or how to water-ski. It defined itself by unpredictability, volatility and transgression of accepted boundaries – of dress code, conventional politeness, time-keeping... In the telling anecdotes, the dominant register is of scorn and eruptive anger.

Fenech Adami’s charisma was that of the immoveable object. It was not built on knowing more but on what one is: the personification of an objective standard of values to which one holds oneself as strictly as others, whether it’s a strict punctuality or a cold intolerance for off-colour jokes, or, more gravely, self-sacrificing duty and resistance to intimidation.

To put it that way is to suggest Fenech Adami represented conventional middle-class virtue. In what world could that possibly come to have charismatic authority? The puzzle is underlined by another contrast between Mintoff and Fenech Adami.

Mintoff’s rhetoric politicised anger (not envy). It took a new, skilled working-class anger at the slights, insults and frustrations of a status-obsessed society and dramatised it – by returning insult and slights. He tapped deeply into the resonant story that the last can be first.

Fenech Adami’s rhetoric, on the other hand, was dry and shorn of everything but the essentials. In a society in which political coercion had invaded every nook of personal life, his speeches were that unusual thing: a flat, impersonal description of an impasse and stern-faced admonition of the only way to get out of it.

The quintessential, memorable Mintoff speech was one in which he carried the listener away. But the quintessential signature speeches by Fenech Adami were the ones where he appealed to the crowds for calm, not to be carried away by emotion; for example, after his house was ransacked in 1979 or after Raymond Caruana was murdered a few years later.

In a world in which voracious anger seemed to be devouring everything, the resonant story became that of the suffering servant, with which increasingly more people could identify.

Fenech Adami, given what he had been subjected to, personified this figure. He articulated a collective voice for people who (unlike skilled workers) were not used to being collectively represented and offered an alternative vision of meaningful solidarity.

All of this might have been expressed at a different time, in a different place. But not charismatically.

Which makes you wonder whether, for the Nationalists to have another Fenech Adami, they need another Mintoff.

ranierfsadni@europe.com