I’m not sure if Joseph Muscat is into historical analogies but when people go into Napoleonic psychosis they do tend to twist little details they remember from their history and transform them into prophesies predicting their own glory.
Either because of that or because Joseph Muscat has been having a special sort of dream at night, he appears in this picture to be wearing braces and a belt at the same time.
His anxiety dreams of being unable to hide his nakedness at some highfalutin meeting of big shots with the power to nominate him to an EU job may be persisting over breakfast. Guilt does that to you. Fear of being found out, of being unmasked through some accident — a lie forgotten, a fingerprint left un-wiped — has a profound impact on someone’s state of mind.
It’s not that Joseph Muscat literally is afraid of his pants falling in important company. I think we’d have heard if that ever actually happened to him and he’s a big boy now. Sort of.
It’s that putting on his clothes in a morning daze of self-importance, his insecurities have the better him.
Or there’s a more disturbing alternative explanation. He’s been shot in several photographs comparable with Benito Mussolini poses. Quite why anyone would consider that historical abomination a role model is hard to fathom but if there are people who follow Mussolini with the idea the seas are a lake in which to drown enemies, real or perceived, it is hardly surprising that someone thinks they can get fashion advice from him. Benito Mussolini famously wore braces and belt in his earlier days of government when he still strode in civilian clothing.
Here’s the only other public person now known to history to wear belt and braces at the same time.