Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil wielded his prerogative yesterday and set up a new Shadow Cabinet.
It was a good signal that Busuttil chose to send out: the Nationalist Party is in the process of change and along the road, his circle of collaborators has evolved as well. When he took the reins in hand, the PN was in disarray, having suffered a rather heavy beating (English understatement, on the lines of our Anglo-Saxon PM’s sense of humour) and with its internal structures creaking and haemorrhaging badly.
PN supporters at the time of Busuttil’s accession (pompous word, but I’m listening to Francois Hollande while writing and it’s rubbing off) had wanted a total renewal and they wanted it now, so the griping and grumbling carried on unabated.
Busuttil has built on the strong showing he made when Muscat’s Big Beast Mallia, the Star Candidate, did what many expected was going to happen sooner rather than later and embarrassed his boss. Muscat came over as a vacillating temporiser who seems to have been worried about what Mallia could do and it took him no less than three weeks, when he could do nothing but fire him, to fire him.
Busuttil, in marked contrast, took the high moral ground and gave PN supporters a taste of the real party, the one that stands for doing things the right way, even if it means votes.
In his reshuffle, Busuttil has done the same: no-one, not even senior former Cabinet Ministers, is indispensable and if necessary, people have to move over or move out. To his, and their, credit the change seems to have been achieved with all on board and accepting their lot, whether there was a promotion or a demotion or a sideways shuffle. There was no stamping of feet, no sulking in tents, no whinging about gilded cages in Brussels or consoling one’s self with caged birds in Ghaxaq.
The move was greeted with general approval within the mediasphere, except of course on the maltastar/adherents axis, where the usual snide and empty remarks spewed out with predictable regularity. My take on this side of the mediasphere is that if they don’t like something, then it must be the right thing to do.
One remark that struck me, and had me shaking my head in awe at the depths of ignorance to which some people manage to descend with every remark they make, was that Busuttil should have taken the opportunity to turn over a new leaf completely and disassociate his party once and for all from "She Who Must Not Be Named".
When this sort of remark comes from the Labour’s Lil’Elves, it can safely be ignored, but when it’s made by someone who holds himself out to be a paragon of all journalistic virtues, including the virtue of speaking his mind at all times, then it betrays an inherent lack of self-confidence and failure to understand on an instinctive level that free speech means all speech, including speech that is more engaging than yours, even if you don’t like it.
When a publication of ideas, in the form of a blog or a magazine or a TV programme or whatever, is welcomed, or argued about, by many, it flourishes. If it is mediocre or unwelcome or ignored, it dies and it doesn’t need Simon Busuttil to endorse it or not or Jihadi terrorists to gun it down.
The media star, or whiner, calling for Busuttil to shun DCG should really look in the mirror and reconcile himself to the fact that press censorship is passe’. I wonder how he likes not being named, incidentally.