Surgeon General’s warning: this article is not about the election campaign.
Well… OK, I tell a lie. Sure it’s about the election campaign. But don’t tell anyone I told you that. For in classic Homeric fashion, I have deliberately chosen such an improbable route to get to the point that I intend to make… and the overwhelming likelihood is that I will eventually get sidetracked and forget to make it altogether… that you would be forgiven for thinking this article was about something else.
And guess what? It probably is.

But let’s start with the headline. Nobble who? A very good question, which fortuitously leads me directly to… digression number one.
The following may come as an intense surprise to people who don’t know me personally, and possibly even to those who do. But once, long ago, in those distant days when I was a still a human being, I used to play this game called “rugby”.
Rugby! The most noble of all sports, characterised by great deeds of valour, gallantry and sportsmanship, spectacular tests of the extreme limits of human endurance and capability… and of course, plenty of wall-to-wall vomiting afterwards.
But to those who have barked their shins, bruised their knees and sprained their ankles (as well as, occasionally, other people’s) for that indefinable Greater Good in whose name the sport is played, rugby is much, much, MUCH more than all that. And if I may be allowed a moment’s mushiness, it is the only sport I have ever truly loved. But like most fatal attractions, our romance was destined to come to grief.

Much as it pains me to now confess this, the stark fact of the matter was that, while I loved (and still love) the game, I was never very good at it. Not being the most athletic type to begin with, I would constantly find myself overtaken, even at the height of my physical fitness, by 18-stone prop-forwards who bore a passing resemblance the title character of the 1950s B horror movie, “The Blob”. And as the years whizzed past, so too did all those younger, fitter, healthier and more co-ordinated teenagers who unfairly insisted on competing against their elders on a playing field that was brutally level.
At first I tried to keep up, fondly imagining that what I lacked in physical prowess I made up for in experience and resourcefulness; but soon I would slow to a gasping, wheezing, asphyxiating halt, and watch breathlessly as the ungrateful little bastards rapidly metamorphosed into distant dust clouds on the horizon.
Thus, heart-broken, I finally hung up my boots. But, irony of ironies! After some 15 years playing rugby every Saturday, without ever suffering any serious injury, I briefly took up chess instead… only to emerge from my first-ever encounter with a black eye, after receiving an unexpected (but thoroughly deserved) “daqqa ta’ pawn”.

As Chuck Berry put it on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack: “Just goes to show you never can tell”.

Anyway: back to my glory days as the founder and unsung scrum-half of a team called (believe it or not) “The Beavers”. I remember this game we once played against a British navy ship – named something like the “HMS Unreasonable” – and by half time, we were trailing by an improbably astronomical score to nothing.
Most of the opposition’s points came courtesy of this nippy little winger who made life hell for all our back line, myself included, by simply whizzing in and out of us like a rugby-playing version of Tazz the Tasmanian Devil.
But fortunately for us Beavers, our coach was the rugby equivalent of Sir Winston Churchill; at half-time, he gathered us in a circle by the side of the pitch, and uttered the most rousing, inspiring and morale-boosting pep-talk since Mel Gibson’s “Freedom!” speech before the battle of Bannockburn in Braveheart.

“See that little £*%$ over there?” he bellowed, pointing at Tazz. “Well, what are you waiting for? NOBBLE HIM!”

So we nobbled him. Which is a rugby player’s way of saying that, five minutes into the second half, Tazz was carried off on a stretcher, while two of our players were yellow carded for spear-tackling him within an inch of his life.
Naturally, we still lost the game by a huge margin, but that didn’t really matter. The pure, unadulterated satisfaction of “nobbling” someone who had invited precisely such treatment by being so damn GOOD, made the entire humiliating defeat worthwhile.

Which brings me to digression number two: or, to use a well-worn rugby cliché… “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Honestly, though. What on earth was the Nationalist Party thinking when it put all its eggs in one, precarious basket called “Gonzipn”? Most times I tend to be an ardent opponent of the death penalty; but I am tempted to make an exception in the case of whoever had the bright idea of trying to present the Prime Minister some as sort of superhuman entity who, alone and unaided by any member of his invisible Cabinet, can:
a) fix MEPA, so that all our environmental woes are miraculously turned to merriment by a deft flick of Gonzipn’s wrist;
b) turn the financial situation around, so that we have a surplus instead of deficit by 2010;
c) save all our energy problems by giving us FOUR WHOLE LIGHT BULBS, absolutely free;
d) walk on water;
e) heal the sick;
f) create employment;
g) raise the dead;
h) turn water into wine, discover intelligent life on Mars (and after that, in the Stamperija), and then return in glory to judge the living and the dead… so that all Holy Nazzjonalisti are admitted to the Life Everlasting, while the evil Laburisti are condemned of hellfire, along with all the AD traitors, Amen.

The truly remarkable thing, of course, is that while the PN strategists seemed to think we would all actually believe that Gonzipn has superhuman powers (sure he does; he just hasn’t used them these last four years), they were all along oblivious to the same strategy’s most glaring pitfall.
Oh, yes. I can just see the MLP core strategy meeting, when the Labour geniuses gathered underneath the upside-down crucifix to concoct their “Plan For A New Satanic Electoral Strategy”.
“So the PN have pinned all their hopes of re-election on Lawrence Gonzi, have they? Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and NOBBLE HIM!”

And they nobbled him. Well, not quite as emphatically as the glorious, historic nobbling referred to above. But undeniably, Gonzi has been made to look a little foolish as he dashed out of that coffee morning with the Ghaqda Nisa Nazzjonalisti Ghawdxin in panic, to be flown to Castille by AFM helicopter.

What’s that again? Yes, I heard Gonzi deny it (thrice, as I recall). And yes, I heard the wonderful excuse: it was just an overzealous civil servant allowing his imagination to run riot (just as it really was the dog which ate my homework in 1984, landing me with a suspension from school that has stunted my intellectual development ever since)... And I know, too, that Gonzipn has taken Alfred Sant to court for a libel suit he will most likely win.
But unlike an increasing number of Maltese citizens who seem to suffer from permanent amnesia – no doubt as a result of their defective DNA – I also have this obscure faculty called “memory”. I distinctly remember how, way back in 2003, the Health Minister Louis Deguara had repeatedly stressed that he was “alarmed” at the spiralling costs of healthcare; how he had revealed in two separate interviews that, yes, there was ongoing discussion about the concept of somehow introducing charges for public health.
And unless I am much mistaken, Deguara was (and still is) a Cabinet minister.

Now we have a memo which states fairly clearly that such discussions did indeed take place in 2004… as well they might; for after all, at that time we were still in the process of calculating the ultimate price-tag of Mater Dei hospital: guesstimating that it would cost something like Lm1 million a week to run.
And yet, for reasons which are at best unclear, the Prime Minister has consistently denied that any such discussion ever took place at all.

I don’t know. Maybe I lack the political nous to understand such lofty matters. Maybe it was that knock on the head against the Kavallieri in ’93. But I personally think Gonzi would have a done a whole better to simply say from day one: “Yes, of course we discussed the issue in 2004. It would have been irresponsible of us not to, considering how unsustainable the health service really is. But in the end we decided against introducing any charges for health, and… oh, look: in fact we never introduced any…”
By my reckoning, that would have been game, set and match to Gonzipn. But he fumbled the ball, and conceded advantage… not enough to throw away the whole game, true, but certainly enough to conjure up that tiniest of fleeting doubts. Maybe, just maybe, our Prime Minister isn’t so superhuman after all.