I have to start this week on a sad note. As I was settling down to write, the news filtered through that one of the good guys had shuffled off this mortal coil. Maurice Tanti Burlò, Nalizpelra, has left us.

A gentleman of the old school, Maurice contributed immensely to the art of political commentary, biting yet never vicious.

Condolences to Elena and Seb; he will be remembered fondly.

It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? Where should one start?

From the bitter end might be a good place: in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, when the Prime Minister makes it known that he has asked for a minister’s resignation, even a two-year old knows that this is not a request and it is emphatically not a request to be ignored. Consequently, the Prime Minister was probably not amused, even with the benefit of his Anglo-Saxon funny-bone, when ex-minister Manuel Mallia decided to behave like whoever it was who had sulked in his tent, oh, yes, Achilles (thank you Google).

I’m not entirely sure what it is about people of a certain type, that they can’t smell the coffee or read the writing on the wall. The ex-incumbent of the gilded cage in Brussels, the one in respect of whom the shiny new commissioner had said there were grounds to prosecute, also failed to get it when José Manuel Barroso gave him the option to resign.

I suppose we should be thankful (for the teeniest of small mercies, to be sure) that the Prime Minister had, finally, to grasp the nettle and do what he should have done three weeks ago and figuratively ask Mallia to be sure the door doesn’t hit him on the way out.

As things stand, once we’ve brought Achilles into the picture, it’s not completely clear whether what has happened is that the government has rid itself of its Achilles’ heel or that the Prime Minister has managed to lumber himself with one.

I suspect that Mallia’s fulsome protestations of undying loyalty, part and parcel of his verbose sick note to Parliament on Wednesday, when he found himself unfit to attend the House, will not have gone very far in dispelling the uneasy feeling between the shoulder blades that a boss who has fired an underling will always feel.

But leaving aside Mallia’s failure to go quietly, and the reasons why he should have, what of the Prime Minister’s handling of the affair?

The board of inquiry didn’t kill this story, not by a long shot

Joseph Muscat has been accused, not without justification, by the leader of the Opposition, and many others, of lacking the courage to do what should have been done in the face of Mallia’s failure to resign three weeks ago.

Instead of taking firm, timely and decisive action, Muscat appointed a board of inquiry whose terms of reference were so nebulous that, frankly, it’s pretty amazing that they actually managed to do what was asked of them, whatever that really was.

To my mind, a board of inquiry is set up to establish facts and not to attribute political responsibility for what may, or may not, have happened within a particular set of circumstances. By allowing themselves to get involved in a political game, the former judges opened themselves up to political commentary on their activities, and no amount of huffing and puffing, by the ex-judges themselves in their report, and by the precious defenders of their integrity, will change this.

Comments about ex-judges who allow themselves to be perceived as playing politicians’ games for them are not “attacks on the judiciary”, as a number of sanctimonious types have declared, their (former) honours should not have stepped into the kitchen if the heat was not to their liking.

The board established a range of facts, if one can call them that, some of them pretty surprising (the exoneration of Kurt Farrugia and Silvio Scerri, for instance) and it came up with an elegant distinction between active and passive cover-ups, though the extent to which this is germane to the issue is debatable at best.

It also gave the Prime Minister a peg onto which to hang the hat he had to wear in order to fire Mallia.

But, apart from that, and apart from confirming something we already knew, after hearing all those recordings, namely that the Prime Minister is right (if for the wrong reasons) that the police force needs a darn good shake-up, what did the inquiry add to the sum total of human knowledge?

Not very much, really, and certainly not much more than anyone who lent an ear to the recordings that were publicised by the Nationalist media would have been able to guess at. In fact, I dare say, reading the ex-judges’ report against the background music of these recordings leads you to the inescapable conclusion that more questions than answers constitute the fabric of this particular tapestry.

And when you also take under advisement Mallia’s sick note, you begin to wonder whether it is your ears, your eyes or your common sense or a combination of same that is deceiving you. If I had the time, and the expertise, I’d sit down with a note pad and compare the time stamps on the recordings with the findings of the board, with Mallia’s sick note and Muscat’s statements.

I’d need a pretty good ear to grasp all the inflections and nuances of the tones of voice used by the protagonists, however. It’s all very well, for example, reading that the ex-acting police commissioner (who has returned to his position one rung down the ladder) asked Paul Sheehan to give him his mobile number, but actually hearing it with a trained ear makes you wonder whether you’re hearing a conspiratorial tone in the question and question yourself as if you’re only imagining it.

There’s plenty more of that sort of thing but, as I said, you would need to be a psychologist with a background in drama and voice coaching to see it all. One of the ironies of the whole thing, though, was how Muscat’s mask has finally slipped, though not to the extent that it fell off completely, which it then did in the House on Wednesday night when Simon Busuttil delivered blow after telling blow.

Muscat was elected on, among others, the myth that he would, as opposed to the nast Nats, be in touch with what people were seeing and hearing around them, a listening government. And a decisive one, though that ship sailed three weeks ago.

Do you know what his explanation is for not knowing what you and I and anyone else who was following the story three weeks ago knew before the DOI issued Farrugia’s press statement?

Here it is: Muscat did not see the media coverage that was publicising the stark fact that Sheehan’s “warning shots” had hit the back of a vehicle driving away from him because he had gone to sleep. Consequently, he was not in a position to do that for which he was later constrained to fire Mallia, that is to say correct the statement so that it would reflect that which so many of us already knew, that is that the car had been hit.

The board of inquiry found Farrugia to be blameless, basically because he relied on the information being passed to him by from the Control Room by no less an authority than the Acting Police Commissioner. Emphatically, therefore, Farrugia’s boss, who had relied on Farrugia, and was soon asleep and therefore blissfully out of touch with the world, could not be tainted with even an iota of blame for the active (or was it passive, I lost the thread of the report) cover-up, a cover-up perpetrated by, from what I can make out, everyone but Mallia and Scerri, but as a result of which Mallia was fired anyway.

Confused? That’s as may be but you can have no end of fun playing with this Rubik’s Cube and coming up with any number of theories that put virtually anyone in the frame. One thing’s for sure, though, the board of inquiry didn’t kill this story, not by a long shot.

Very briefly, a quick recommendation: the Galley, next to the Royal Malta Yacht Club, we had a very enjoyable meal there on Tuesday, the day winter started.

imbocca@gmail.com

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