Opportunity knocked twice for John Dalli, who will take on the lucrative Brussels job he first refused in 2004 to contest the PN leadership – but has he succumbed to Gonzi’s bait after refusing Fenech Adami, asks James Debono?
He described himself as the “father confessor” to a coterie of disgruntled backbenchers in a MaltaToday interview, and for a brief period of time John Dalli – super-minister for health, social services and community care – may have sparked up an alternative network of Nationalist MPs who claim to be clamouring for a more ‘inclusive’ party and government.
He spent three years in the political wilderness, relegated to a backbencher after a resignation that was at best, contrived – at worst, forced. He said the prime minister had told him he could not have “a minister under investigation” – referring to unfounded (later found to be fabricated) allegations that Dalli was on a kickback on a multi-million hospital tender. Dalli resigned when the allegations had not even reached the Commissioner of Police’s desk. And then he spent the next years carving out his niche of ‘disgruntlement’ from a newspaper column.
In the end, Gonzi decided to rehabilitate him: he propped up the former minister in a press conference at Castille to declare that Dalli had been wronged by devious detractors, and offered him the role of special advisor. That was in 2007, just before the general elections of March 2008. Dalli nearly made it on two electoral districts, and was made Social Policy Minister.
But two years into Gonzi’s second administration, as unhappiness started brewing on his backbench, suddenly it seemed Dalli’s stature as an aspirant leader, forged by the turbulent 1980s and embittered by his fall from his grace, had turned him into a reference point for the MPs protesting their exclusion from Gonzi’s inner circle.
“I act as a father confessor to most of them… They come to me and I try to explain to them what the situation is at the present… These are good people who need to be fostered and not hit on the head,” Dalli said back in October, outlining his new paternal role as a senior minister trusted by a select group of MPs.
But speaking to MaltaToday after his nomination as Commissioner, Dalli now dismisses any suggestion that his role was in any way “conspiratorial”.
“My role was that of passing messages on to bring more unity, not more division,” Dalli said.
And neither does he feel that he has relinquished his role as confessor by taking the lucrative, €220,000-a-year job in Brussels. “This was not an official ‘post’ I had to relinquish. I simply enjoy the trust of these MPs with whom I will remain in contact through the use of modern technology,” he remarked, perhaps wryly, about his new email confessional.
No love lost
In spite of his political comeback in 2008, where he was duly returned as a government heavyweight with authority on three major portfolios, it seems the past had still returned to haunt Dalli’s relationship with Gonzi.
Interviewed by Julia Farrugia on Wicc Imb Wicc, Dalli accused the Prime Minister of applying two weights and two measures in his handling of his resignation in 2004, and his defence of Finance Minister Tonio Fenech after accepting two freebies from businessmen Joe Gasan and George Fenech to watch a football match in their company.
On air, he stated he preferred not to pass judgement on Gonzi’s handling of the disgruntled MPs – Franco Debono, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Robert Arrigo, famously showcased as the ‘gang of three’ on Bondiplus. It was a silence that perhaps spoke volumes. “I prefer to keep that to myself,” he replied after observing that “it requires skill to put things together.”
Perhaps deep down, he still thought of himself as the one with these skills. But it is extremely doubtful whether Gonzi approved of Dalli’s role as father confessor to the MPs who had fallen out of favour with the administration.
For the past year, speculation in the press about Dalli being offered the Brussels post fuelled the perception of Gonzi giving his rival a definite “polite kick upstairs”. Dalli was up against incumbent Joe Borg, a technocrat who can do no harm inside the EC; and Richard Cachia Caruana, éminence grise whose court and power base was already in Brussels.
In what many will admit was a surprising turn of events for Dalli to accept the post, the minister insists this was not a case of him being ousted from the Cabinet. As he said in October, “whether it’s a kick or not I do not know. But surely it is not a question of being given an unimportant position under the pretext that you are being honoured” – pointing out that the commissars of Europe were not banquet-hosting heads of state, but real executive decision-makers turning the wheels of the Union around.
Gonzi’s mastery So it was to prove his point that Gonzi claimed this week that Dalli had already angled for the post back in 2004, a claim contradicted by Eddie Fenech Adami, who revealed Dalli was “reluctant” to accept his offer.
Ironically, it was Dalli’s sense of dignity in turning down an offer served on a plate by none other than the party patriarch, that paved the way for a democratic leadership contest between three hopefuls for the succession. It was an act of insubordination, that paved the way for future dissidents.
For although Dalli was trounced, with 59% of delegates opting for Gonzi, the latter was never to enjoy the same hold over the party that Fenech Adami had before him. And Gonzi would later find even his own supporters suddenly resenting the exclusive inner circle that his leadership had turned into. And never before had the PN experienced such a cacophony of dissenting voices.
Dalli’s inability to secure the leadership was a prelude to his troubles, as his status of aspirant leader to disgraced backbencher after presenting his resignation – the first time in their history of governing that a Nationalist prime minister had failed to stand by his minister as he faced a maelstrom of allegations from all sides. Labour claimed Dalli used his ministerial influence to entice the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines to choose his son-in-law’s firm Gauci Borda Shipping as their local agents; The Times uncovered a Lm40,000 spending spree on airline tickets for the foreign ministry from a company with business relations to Dalli’s daughter, Tourist Resources Ltd; and then the final nail in the coffin, the Joe Zahra report – a fabricated private investigator’s report handed by Dutch firm Simed to Gonzi, claiming that Inso, the Italian firm which had been awarded a medical equipment contract for Mater Dei, had paid kickbacks to Dalli’s brother Sebastian, and to the daughter of contracts director Joseph Spiteri.
Dalli’s parting shot in his resignation letter alluded to a backstabbing from within the party itself. “The strategies plotted against me in the last weeks from different quarters created circumstances under which, I feel, I cannot work effectively,” Dalli wrote to Gonzi. Still despite his relegation to the backbench after having served in every Nationalist Cabinet between 1987 and 2004, Dalli simply refused to fade away from the political scene, building a reputation as an independent and critical mind.
His perseverance earned him a full rehabilitation by Gonzi and Dalli got elected in his home district and earned another 1,711 first-preferences in the tenth district, the hotbed of pale blue disgruntlement in which he had contested for the first time.
For a time he re-emerged as a potential reference point for dissidents that had now become emboldened by the fragility of Gonzi’s one-seat majority. And it was undoubtedly reassuring for some dissidents to think of Dalli as a senior minister who could listen to them.
But has Dalli now let down the backbenchers? Does Dalli’s promise of a virtual postcard from the Berlaymont building temper the woes of the MPs? Or was all the talk of his father-confessor role a fanciful idea, that for a time created the perception that Dalli was still a potential adversary to Gonzi?
By getting Dalli to accept a post in Brussels, Gonzi might have found the ultimate cure for disgruntlement: buying the peace with more and more appointments. Dalli may have fallen for the bait – an irresistible position. The politician’s vanity does the rest of the job.
Others will probably follow: with this kind of political mastery, Gonzi keeps everyone guessing.
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