I imagine many readers will remember the billboard which showed Lawrence Gonzi holding up a mangy-looking omelette (froġa). Well, last week’s push-back business left Joseph Muscat with a least three of the equally-inedible things and egg all over the kitchen.

First, the way things unfolded on Tuesday showed a series of errors of judgment by the Prime Minister. The more he tried to writhe and wriggle out of it, the stickier it got.

For starters, a minor thing. A modicum of sense of occasion would have helped somewhat. It doesn’t look right to give television interviews and talk of national desperation and crises to a backdrop of paintings, porcelain and a neo-classical commode. Mercifully in the circumstances, that silver-lined requisite of the Maltese official mantelpiece, or gradenza – ‘me with the Pope, high five’ – was nowhere to be seen.

But there were more serious matters. Muscat told us that evening that there was no such thing as bad publicity. The waiting planes and “all options open” bully talk were, in fact, a tactic, a cunning plan intended to make the EU (I thought we weren’t external to it, but never mind) “wake up and smell the coffee”.

Seer-like, he had foretold all the do-gooder resistance and bad press. Unlike common folk like myself who couldn’t tell a game of chess if the floors at St John’s were re-paved in black and white tiles.

With respect to his Office, I don’t believe him for a second. I’m sure he would have sent them back had things panned out differently – just as the Nationalist government booted a group of asylum seekers back to war-torn Eritrea 10 years ago.

Incidentally, back then I had resigned in protest as newspaper reviewer on Campus FM after the station management blocked the programme’s repeat on the rubbish excuse of libel. I had criticised the government for the Eritrean repatriation. Not surprisingly, I was never sued for libel.

But let us for a glib second take the Prime Minister’s word for it that this was all a masterclass of statesmanly sleight. That would make matters doubly wrong, for at least two reasons.

First, under no circumstances can people be used as pawns to push around on the negotiating table. Especially not if they happen to be among the most vulnerable of all social types, most certainly not if they have just come off a boat adrift on the high seas for days.

Second, he would be guilty of sending in the nuclear missile first and the ambassadors later. Muscat is implying that he is a wizard of international negotiation. On the contrary, and if he’s being honest about the tactic business, his approach will have meant the failure of negotiations. Given that he’s been in power for a couple of months that would make him come across as rather short-fused.

The second general problem has to do with the bad blood and outspoken callousness that seems to have overtaken a sizeable chunk of the population since Tuesday. To my mind, the responsibility for that goes mainly to Muscat.

One might argue that there was nothing overtly racist or xenophobic about the Prime Minister’s words and actions, and that he can hardly be blamed for the popular wave of these two undesirables; in other words, that what happened on Tuesday only willy nilly resonated with a pre-existing tissue of hatred and suspicion.

I cautiously accept the first and strongly reject the second, for two reasons. First, and if readers will allow me the platitude, with great power (and Muscat’s overwhelming plebiscite gives him that) comes great responsibility – plus the lion’s share of things like blame and glory. Words like ‘unwittingly’ do not sit comfortably with the top job.

Second, there is nothing natural or primordial about xenophobia and racism. No one is born thinking that national borders must be defended against outsiders, or that black people are a lower order. Which means that such beliefs and passions are quite literally manufactured, intentionally or not.

Pick up any serious book or paper on xenophobia and the term ‘political entrepreneurship’ will invariably come up. The idea is that politics is a leading manufacturer and that politicians have a lot to answer for.

How about the current wave? I wouldn’t say Muscat created it out of nothing. Quite the contrary, in fact, the ingredients were very much at hand. But that in no way absolves him from the charge that, intentionally or not, his words and actions manufactured a good chunk of the damned undesirables.

There is nothing natural or primordial about xenophobia and racism

Take by analogy the issue of divorce, or the situation of gays and transsexuals. I’m not really in the mood to be nice to Muscat, but fair’s fair, the laudable stand he took on these matters (and I don’t care terribly much whether or not it was a cynical ploy) quickly and surely turned the tide in favour of a more sensitive understanding.

I know people who 10 years ago would happily have bashed Joanne Cassar’s brains out; now, following Labour’s initiatives, they see things very differently. That’s because no one was born hating men who want to be women, or women who love women, or divorcees. It was politics that made all the difference.

The Prime Minister took the glory (and the ballot papers) for that. Now he has to take the blame for the klandestini-bashing.

There’s a third thing. The Prime Minister needn’t be too hard on himself. We know and understand that the problem (if we must use that word) of millions of Africans wanting to move north and prepared to do so by any means is much bigger than any number of Joseph Muscats. It would be unfair to expect him to come up with a general remedy.

I suggest it wouldn’t be quite historically accurate to blame global differences and hierarchies on Muscat. The only thing we expect of him is that he learn to live with the problem – for live with it he must – in a humane and sensitive manner.

It’s one thing to punch above one’s weight (and Herman Van Rompuy’s use of the expression sounded to me like a parent scolding a baby for rattling the cot), quite another to come to blows with the heavyweight boxing champion using hapless Africans as gloves.

If the Prime Minister cannot see the greater picture, I respectfully appeal to him to think at least in terms of his immediate family. Whatever their father does and whether he likes it or not, his daughters will grow up in a multi-ethnic and heterogenous Malta. The choice is between a functional conviviality and a living hell.

mafalzon@hotmail.com