Applied psychology

In 1941 Charles Chaplin parodied Adolph Hitler at the peak of his power in The Great Dictator.

There’s a scene where his Hynkel (Hitler) receives advice from his henchman Garbitsch (Goebells) about how to deal with someone who was coming to see him at a meeting. That someone Napoloni (Mussolini) made Hynkel nervous and Garbitsch told him the room could be conditioned to make Napoloni feel appropriately inferior.

Watch the clip here.

Now imagine the thinking the prime minister and his staff have put into setting the scene to receive 6 women in t-shirts with zero political experience and with day jobs to go back to. When you see how hard they look like they must have worked at making Joseph Muscat look the part of the big, powerful man, you have to imagine the nerves he must have been under before they stepped in. Picture Hynkel above.

Such a high-powered delegation around the prime minister at a meeting with anyone without little flags on the table is a rarity indeed. He broke protocol and relegated Owen Bonnici to make sure he was flanked by women. There’s been some noise at Paul Borg Olivier’s suggestion that the choice of Julia Farrugia in the aftermath of a political killing was, shall we say, another piece of applied psychology.

And then there’ the use of the josephmuscat.com email address, though he is known to have a gov.mt email address like all public officials. That suggests that the carbon copy may have been a bit of an accident.

Ray Barbara’s bald head is seen prominently in the background of the meeting #occupyjustice had with the prime minister doing the heavy breathing thing with the other white collared toughies he rounded up.

Raymond Barbara was Joseph Muscat’s personal assistant in 2013 and in spite of a directorship in the public service remains, as far as can be understood, the prime minister’s body man.

Here he features in a Daphne Caruana Galizia post pushing journalists aside for doing their work, behaving like the security guard of a hip-hop artist and calling the local free press “morons” even in the presence of the democratic leader of this democratic country.