The man from the FT. It sounds like a 1960s spy thriller, but it’s really the photos on Godfrey Grima’s office wall that sparsely chronicle his 38 years covering a substantial chunk of Europe and its adjacent countries for the Financial Times. Photos with the likes of his friend, Private Eye founder Richard Ingrams, or Prince Rainier of Monaco, to name a couple. It’s undoubtedly the time spent watching this little island from afar that renders Grima a little less iffy about the Schulz endorsement of Joseph Muscat, or enthralled by the dynamism that a young leader could give back to Labour (he waxes admiringly about youth); and how he talks about Labour being “sexy” once again, and giving something meaningful to young voters who did not see Labour as an option in either 2003 or 2008.
Grima left Malta for Fleet Street in 1965. He can extrapolate something about the aspirations of the youth vote in post-EU membership Malta. And it’s this sizeable chunk of 30,000-odd first-time voters that seemed to have left Labour in the lurch once again. Grima says it’s time for a turnaround.
For someone who authored both a report on Labour’s 2003 electoral defeat, and later the Nationalist Party’s dismal 2004 performance in the European Parliament elections, Grima sounds unperturbed by the findings of the new report into Labour’s defeat.
“Well… the commission itself seems to have confirmed our findings. Maybe the party will disagree with that, but there are always shortcomings in a campaign. In politics it’s the product that counts, the rest are tools: whether you wear smart clothes, groom your hair, have good elocution, or launch charm offensives. But at the end of the day people choose the product, and they either have faith in you or not. Such a report as the commission’s will normally point out shortcomings. It is instinctive. They won’t look at the plusses.”
I ask Grima to consider Alfred Sant’s failure at selling his product, in a nutshell his credibility, starting from his contrived re-election in 2003, the U-turns, the inability to command authority from among a disillusioned faction.
“I think these are generalities. In our report (the 2003 report) we found there had been a lot of myths, such as that of Sant being less popular than Eddie Fenech Adami. Sant was more credible on certain issues. I keep saying it’s a mistake for politicians to rely on what the media say about them and instead they should be meeting people face to face. In the words of journalists, Sant was ‘doable’ – you could knife him and he wouldn’t lunge back at you. You wouldn’t do that with Dom Mintoff or Fenech Adami, you wouldn’t get away with it…”
But at the end of the day, Gonzi won on the charm factor, the charisma or the trust…
“Did he?” Grima asks with conviction. “With all that media, the 20 years in government, the good the Nationalist government did for this country… take a look at the schools, the roads, the health services. They took Malta into the EU, no mean feat surely, and look at all the millions pouring into the country through membership. Do you expect someone like that to end up with meagre surplus of 1,500 votes?”
Surely not. But not when the government was, as Lino Spiteri earlier pointed out, “on the run”, having to literally sideline its tired Cabinet to hedge its bets on its sole redeeming factor – Gonzi. Labour on the other hand, made a mess of its campaign.
“Yes, but there were over 30,000 people who didn’t have faith in either party. They said they didn’t want to vote. Labour failed. But if we are talking about credibility, none of the two parties are credible. The people have told the parties to clean up their houses. I don’t think anyone won really. I don’t think anybody lost. The people won, because they told the politicians that nothing is given, that they will take this power from them if they say so.”
Eventually, faced with the burgeoning evidence in the 2008 report, Grima does concede that, when the chips were down, Labour wasn’t able to make it.
“Although it was not a vote of confidence in the Nationalist government,” he insists.
And then there is Michael Falzon’s unhappy reaction at the conclusions of the report, to which Grima lets out a compassionate sigh. “Ah, Michael… miskin…”
“Michael is hurt and I understand him. Firstly, parties are by their own nature spaces for debate and for ideas to clash. Why should everybody in this country be so shocked and encapsulate everything into ‘splits’? These are not splits. Parties all over the world are arenas for ideas and personalities to clash.
“This commission gave a lot of weight to the operations of the electoral office. We (the authors of Labour’s 2003 report) found the same kind of glitches back then, for example they had used an older electoral register. But the electoral office is just one tool. The real important structures are the local clubs, the streetleaders and the activists. The PN had the same problems with incorrect databases. But this does not lose you an election.”
Even though Falzon’s bitter recriminations may hardly augur well for his leadership, his finger-pointing at the blunders of his colleagues in the leadership (which gave short shrift to his “Labour United” slogan) makes Grima thankful at seeing such a healthy venting of people’s frustrations.
“The alternative would be a Chinese communist-style party, where everybody claps when the leader appears. We had it in the time of Mintoff. Even though I was an outcast, I had ministers telling me what a rotten man he was, that you couldn’t trust him, that he was a liar, that he hardly got it right, that he was in the stratosphere… it just didn’t manifest on the outside, it was a semi-dictatorship. We should be thankful the debate is out in the public, it makes for greater democracy.”
So Michael Falzon does not resign for his role in the election loss, and neither does secretary-general Jason Micallef, I tell Grima. There’s a pig-headed refusal to accept responsibility for this electoral outcome.
“It’s the party that decides what to do with Micallef. In my view the secretary-general is an administrator. A recommendation we made in 2003 was to have a chief executive to handle administration. If you have a CEO who is not elected, he doesn’t have to pander to votes. In my view the secretary-general does not take the full blast of reform or criticism, but executes the policies of the leadership.”
But Micallef was outed as having kept the opinion polls to himself, not raising the alarm when Labour’s fortunes were turning, and sending out foolhardy Labour supporters on a premature celebration when predicting a strong majority early in the day.
“Yes, but at the end of the day his boss is the general conference,” Grima says, pointing towards the Labour delegates as the jury for Micallef.
Having said that, even if Joseph Muscat ascends to the throne, the young MEP will have a hard time reuniting the various factions inside this ramshackle MLP. Grima however is confident that Muscat can give Labour their much-needed turnaround, opining that age is on his side.
“The university rector is 39. A friend of mine in particular runs an empire employing 30,000, and he is 34. The job of the next leader will include branding, but also delivering on efficiency. As parties from the left and right converge to the centre, the next election will be fought on efficiency. I can imagine Joseph agreeing with an observation such as that of John Dalli, who after 20 years of Nationalist rule, says hospital waiting lists are unacceptable. We’re not talking anymore about ideology – it’s what the services we get from the taxes we pay that count.”
But surely, it’s the blurring of party lines that makes politics less attractive to voters today. There must be meaning, I tell Grima, asking him to define what a Labourite effectively is. “It means having a social conscience. That the means don’t justify the end. That you don’t buckle when you are strong on principle.”
Grima rummages through those political parties who found their fortunes on manifestos manufactured by the opinion polls (from the media-conscious Blairite Labour and Berlusconi’s dumb-friendly Forza Italia), where ideology does not matter as much. Not as much as for the Italian communists, for example. “But they’re not the party led by the Berlinguer I interviewed… and that time is now over. It’s a different world: a world that is consuming far more than before, that has to find a way of preserving the planet, where people want satisfaction over a broad sweep of things, in clothing, the houses they need, the urban areas they want, and the pleasure they get from communication… it’s a totally different world.”
And from this, we return to the need to that very crude notion of delivering ‘efficiency’ to the electorate. “30,000 people had a choice, and they said they wouldn’t vote PN, definitely. Labour wasn’t an option either. And most of them were young people who say it isn’t sexy to vote Labour anymore. This is why Labour has to become more meaningful to people’s lives, to do better for the country, and to give people the satisfaction of living in this country.
Before we get back to Joseph Muscat, I mention his maligned endorsement by the German MEP Martin Schulz, the chairman of the socialist MEPs. To which Grima, evidently untainted by any historic hang-ups, mocks the angry reaction to Muscat’s endorsement as a throwback to Mintoff’s Foreign Interference Act (which bans foreign participation in local politics). “What the hell are we talking about?” he splutters with incredulousness. “Haven’t people understood what being an EU member is all about? There are no borders. Where is this idea of the big wise man coming from afar to influence delegates coming from?”
“I have great faith in youth,” Grima says, referring to Joseph Muscat and the reason he endorsed him. “I have faith in educated youth, in youth that shows moderation and measure, youth that doesn’t want to use politics for self-aggrandisement. Muscat is an economist. Labour needs somebody who has the time to settle down, learn, appreciate what’s good and what isn’t about this country, and concentrate on righting what’s wrong, and not get into useless arguments with the Nationalists over nothing. He is the sort of man who should lead the Labour Party. He has five years ahead of him to use well, think in terms of what works for all of us, whether we are Nationalist or Labour. Labour has to stop being divisive about every single little thing. This is a country that is too small to be divided over everything. From the contenders there are, Joseph Muscat is able to take this step of quality.”