There’s only one question being asked after last week’s pointless PN General Council: should Charlon Gouder (recipient of the Prime Minister’s “good journalist” award) be awarded a prize for outing Peter Darmanin and like-minded councillors as blubbering fools?
One shudders to think what politics would be like without Gouder’s persistence, and it’s only for this distraction that we should all wish Labour to remain in Opposition. His quizzing of the councillors over whether they knew the reason John Dalli had resigned produced dumbstruck individuals clearly stuck for words. In short, they don’t know why Dalli, a senior minister, had resigned.
For those not versed in matters political, the General Council is a massive P.E. class for these hundreds of PN councillors sweating it out with rapid bursts of vigorous applause and yea-saying. Such political conferences are of course no longer what they used to be. Nostalgics remember them to be places where sturdy long-term policies would be hammered out. Today it’s just light, sound and action.
And still, the difficult decisions confronting the parties persist: will the party leader wear a dark suit or pastel shirt? Who will be the young girls strategically peering over Gonzi’s shoulders during his address. Indeed, questions Joe Saliba must be losing sleep over.
But last week’s showcase of national serenity and sycophantism was entirely different, conspicuously marked by John Dalli’s absence from the speaker’s list, Austin Gatt’s highly provocative jab at Alfred Sant, the neo-Stalinist silencing of backbenchers Robert Musumeci and Jean-Pierre Farrugia, and the surprise appearance of golden boy Michael Mifsud by the side of Kate Gonzi.
Now, getting a laugh out of Alfred Sant may be like trying to open a mussel with a plastic fork (this man is PM-in-waiting after all!). But Austin Gatt’s suggestion that Sant might befit the ranks of inebriated and pill-popping statesmen like Churchill and Eden has now taken a beautiful turn because the Labour leader felt so annoyed his love of the tipple was subject to ridicule, that he instituted criminal proceedings against Gatt.
And is Gatt dreading the three-month imprisonment sentence if found guilty of libel? Not if he can privatise Corradino and sell it to a strategic partner.
Remember the 1996 slogan “Sport u droga ma jimxux id f’id” (sport and drugs don’t mix)? Well, they did at the general council. For after Gatt’s innuendo, Malta international Michael Mifsud became the General Council’s unwitting poster boy after being led to believe he was about to meet the Prime Minister.
This week Joe Saliba could not answer – with a simple yes or no – whether Mifsud was told he would be taken to the General Council, on-stage, sandwiched between Kate Gonzi and Saliba, in Lawrence Gonzi’s warm seat while the PM gave his speech. “We told him it was a PN activity,” Saliba said, which was later refined to “a political meeting organised by the PN”. But was the general council actually specified? Of course not.
Because the PN’s hologram machine went into overdrive at this point, the idea being that getting the man of the moment in a partisan activity was a sure-fire publicity stunt.
But as Saliba put it: “I don’t see the general council as partisan, but political”. Which, while we’re on the subject of football, is a load of balls.