I am not in the business of writing character references for politicians who aspire to top EU jobs. I should therefore leave out the soppy bit about Toni Abela. That leaves me with mixed feelings, because there is a sense in which the matter is a symptom of what we might call the Eurovision Complex. What happened on Tuesday was hardly Armageddon. A man was interviewed for a job he didn’t get, and that’s not necessarily an occasion for the nation to wheel out the collective ashes and sackcloth.

I don’t suppose that millions of Europeans tuned in to watch Malta’s humiliation live on telly, or that market squares all over the continent were alive with talk of how mediocre the best in Europe really were. By the same currency, I haven’t so far met anyone who lost sleep over the poor showing by the nominees from Poland and Slovakia.

That said, Malta’s failed nomination is not irrelevant. Certainly it tells us something about the state of the art here in Malta, and why the Prime Minister’s high trust rating is a bigger mystery than the Bermuda Triangle.

As befits the date, the main talk was of drawn daggers and honourable men. The hypotheses bandied about were many and colourful. For some, the Nationalist Party was guilty of high treason against the State. Others saw Joseph Muscat as a right royal Brutus. Cyrus Engerer was blamed for being a ‘callous delinquent’ who had no business briefing Abela, and Richard Cachia Caruana for being in a state of active hibernation.

I am in no position to assess the relative merits of these propositions. In a way they are irrelevant, because the bare fact is that a man was interviewed for a job he didn’t get.

There were three problems with Toni Abela. First, he just wasn’t qualified for the post. The rapporteur was very clear about this at the end of Tuesday’s session. He reminded the committee that the rules stated that candidates should have experience in external audit. This was the necessary condition – just as, if I applied to work as a deliveryman, I should have a driving licence.

Abela did not have that experience. In the interview he tried to wriggle out of it by saying that his political career meant that he had effectively served as an auditor on the public’s behalf. The committee evidently found this definition of audit rather laboured and optimistic, and so did I.

The Prime Minister’s high trust rating is a bigger mystery than the Bermuda Triangle

Second, his past (present, almost) as a politician worked against him. Abela was at pains throughout the interview to explain that he was also a lawyer by profession. Coming from someone who had been in the thick of it for so long, the argument was bound to be unconvincing. It was clear from the questions that the committee saw him as a politician, nominated for the post for reasons of political expediency.

Third, there was the cocaine matter. Now I happen to be with Abela on this one. I never bought the ‘blokka bajda’ spin, and I think Abela came across in the secret tapes as someone who had taken tangible measures to root out the dubious characters running some of the Labour Party clubs.

Hardly Malta’s El Chapo, in other words. Still, the fact remains that the c-word was mentioned at the interview, and that – fairly or not – its shock value was bound to leave traces of pollution.

On at least these three counts, the odds were stacked against Abela getting the job. Which leaves us with Louis Galea. Like Abela, Galea was a politician with no experience in professional external audit. His many years in the fray had also left him with his fair share of blemishes, though none that had to do with cocaine. Why, then, did Abela fail where Galea succeeded?

Except we may be asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why Abela failed, maybe we should be asking why Galea succeeded. But the answer to that is now material for an historian’s footnotes.

Abela’s bio was not the only thing that worked against him. Whatever his abilities and merits, his performance on Tuesday was poor. In terms of style, he came across at times as semi-articulate. He also failed to make the transition from the kind of language that one uses to score points against Beppe on Xarabank, or to entertain the gesticulating punters outside the law courts in Valletta, to that required of a prospective EU auditor.

That transition would have been possible, given the right briefing and coaching. It obviously worked with Karmenu Vella, who at the time of his interview was not exactly a world expert on the environment and fisheries, and who was at least as fluent as Abela in the fine idiom of the Maltese political gutter. Which leaves us with two options: Abela was not given the right briefing and coaching, or he was too headstrong to listen and play along.

I disagree with Simon Busuttil that Tuesday was a “sad day for Malta” and that “the actions of Joseph Muscat continue to embarrass Malta and the Maltese”. Malta is a geological formation that is not big on emotions. As for the Maltese, they spent the day going about their daily business with not much to be embarrassed about.

Rather, the main part of the embarrassment pertains to the Prime Minister alone. He was the one who hand-picked a nominee who very obviously did not have the right credentials for the job. That alone would be a serious error of judgement. If he did so for political expediency, the matter becomes something else altogether.

mafalzon@hotmail.com