April in recent years has not been kind to the Prime Minister and the Labour Party. To quote T. S. Eliot, it has been “the cruellest month”.
In April 2016 the Prime Minister faced mounting Opposition pressure to deal with two members of his government, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, for setting up companies in Panama. Round One therefore saw Muscat doggedly resisting calls for their resignation, and indeed his own.
This, it turned out, was a decision that would haunt him the following April… and again this April. But in 2016, after just a few months, Panama was off the boil and preparations for Malta’s EU Presidency had taken centre stage.
Fast forward to April 2017: Malta is bang in the middle of the Presidency and the Prime Minister is hit again. This time it’s his wife who is in the eye of the storm. Daphne Caruana Galizia has linked Michelle Muscat to the third Panamanian company, Egrant, and claims that one million dollars have been deposited in that offshore haven via Pilatus Bank.
The move is calculated to cause maximum embarrassment to Muscat and destabilise his government one year before the general election. Yet Caruana Galizia’s refusal (inability?) to come up with the goods and produce the compelling evidence she claims to have seen, diminishes her credibility and blunts the very edge of those revelations.
The ordinary man on the street was simply not prepared to take someone’s word for it: someone whose aim and purpose – by her own admission – has ever been to destroy the Labour Party and keep it out of government.
And Caruana Galizia’s reputation preceded her. As the Blog-Queen of Malta, she had managed to turn her mission into a national pastime, to the amusement and delight of those who still look upon Labourites as genetically modified. Today these people are struggling uncomfortably with ‘freedom of expression’ – the famous last words they guarded, in their own interests, so jealously, back then.
In any case, Muscat’s stoic denial and his willingness to submit himself to a magisterial inquiry won the day. End of Round Two. He then went on to win the 2017 June election with an even greater majority than in 2013. This was a surprise, even for Labour supporters, and devastating indeed for all those who had confidently believed that Caruana Galizia’s scandalous revelations would cost Labour the election, or at least put the Nationalist Party in the running again. It was not to be.
It is my belief that many who voted for the Labour Party in June 2017 had entertained no intention of doing so just a few months before, and only changed their mind post-Egrant, once the campaign turned really brutal and ugly. Call it a twisted form of tribalism, call it rooting for the underdog or a knee-jerk reaction to finding oneself besieged, but the viciousness caused many people to close ranks. Everything else ceased to matter – even absolute truth.
The whole thing smacks of another frame-up
So you could argue that Caruana Galizia’s deep-seated hatred of the Labour Party killed her own story. Perhaps the lesson of the electoral result is that vitriolic campaigns and less-than-solid allegations don’t work. They only sell newspapers and increase blog traffic – and help the other side to win. Caruana Galizia suddenly became the Labour Party’s lucky charm, its major asset. She was the Midas touch, and everyone she attacked was an overnight success.
So the minute she turned her guns on Adrian Delia, I immediately knew that the other contenders for the PN leadership were history. Had she left Delia alone, the odds favouring Chris Said would have been higher. It is a truth universally acknowledged that human nature favours the underdog.
In a frank and rather telling interview, her husband Peter Caruana Galizia admitted that his wife realised finally that her blog was marking time and had ceased to be effective. It was still widely read, but preaching only to the converted – to the backstage fire stokers, to the ‘network of spies’ watching from their safe distances, leaving their champion exposed on the front line.
April 2018 has lived up to all expectations. The cruellest month has already rained on the Labour Party’s parade. So we’re in Round Three. It’s no longer Labour versus Daphne Caruana Galizia. It’s now an ‘international project’ – a collaboration of 18 international media organisations committed to continuing Caruana Galizia’s work and keeping her stories alive.
As such, it’s a noble initiative, commendable in theory. Yet its attempt to pin Caruana Galizia’s murder on MP Chris Cardona is hardly inspiring. The evidence is flimsy, the source very ‘fly-by-night’. Telling us, in halting English, that Cardona was a ‘friend’ of one of the accused, based on a single alleged sighting and a verbal exchange (since denied), is not good enough. The whole thing smacks of another frame-up, of an opportunity to sand-bag the Labour Party with the international media.
And while the 17 Black story does have damning implications, I do fear that in a paradoxically ‘patriotic’ attempt to save Malta from ubiquitous corruption, our country is being presented to the world ubiquitously as the pariah of the European Union. No one is denying that there are many things to be put right in this country; but is parading a caricature of ourselves to the rest of the world the right way to go about it?
It’s no wonder that law-abiding Maltese travellers abroad are beginning to feel self-conscious and awkward for being ‘Maltese’. Will the right kind of visitor, the right kind of investment, continue to take us seriously? It almost feels like the overriding priority in some quarters is to portray Malta as a lawless mafia State. This is a ‘packaged’ product that’s deceptively easy to export. The Guardian, CNN, et al might buy it. But it won’t fly off the shelves here.
michelaspiteri@gmail.com