It’s an old slasher movie trope. You think the villain is dead. The vampire has been shot through the forehead with a silver bullet dipped in holy water. The zombie has been torn from limb to limb. The pervert with the ski mask has been electrocuted.
It is finally time to release all the piled up tension as the virginal heroine wearing little more than underwear, her golden blonde mane smeared with blood, her bosom heaving in a platonic post-coital diminuendo, the 9-inch kitchen knife stuck to the palm of her hand glued to bodily fluids not all her own, sits on the floor, rests her back to the wall looking away from the corpse of the monster that had been chasing her and affords herself congratulations for having survived to the end of the movie when everyone else is now for the in tray of the forensic examiner.
Now you too, dear hapless horror movie viewer, can breathe. You can let down your guard. There will be no more frights, no more shrill chords and no more of the cruel twists the film-maker has been throwing at you with sadistic abandon this last breathless hour.
It’s over. A happy ending at last.
But wait. The monster’s eyes, incredibly, flicker open. He’s not dead yet! And now the fright hits you and our darling heroine while in the most vulnerable state possible, when our guard is down. We did not get the memo. We did not drive a stake through the vampire’s heart, we did not puncture the zombie’s brain, we did not remove the ski mask and handcuff the castrated pervert.
So, here’s the thing. Joseph Muscat is still here.
When he announced he would be leaving last December we had a stinging feeling he was looking for ways to stay on. Right up to the 12th of January, the day he was meant to leave, we weren’t quite sure he was really going. We saw him climb down the steps of Castille and it still barely look real.
But a new prime minister was sworn in on that day. ‘New’ is a big word in this case. Robert Abela did not fall on Castille like rain from an unclouded sky. He had been part of the furniture. He sat at cabinet meetings even though he was not a government minister. And he advised Joseph Muscat as his lawyer through the Panama scandal, the Egrant debacle, the Vitals imbroglio, the Neville Gafà conspiracy, the Chris Cardona orgy, the Daphne assassination cover-up, the Yorgen Fenech runner, the Keith Schembri fugitivity and so on.
And yet, as ever in politics, the risers are the ones who can swim in the slime and the mud and emerge squeaky clean lathered in a transparent oil that makes their muscles glisten and their steroids evanesce.
But how could Joseph Muscat leave office, we asked. His power had seemed unassailable. A general election on that spot would have likely returned him with unlimited powers. Malta was ripe for his picking. He could hold it as a tyrant and dictator no longer merely in ambition but in practice with the screaming support of a large national majority. His control over his parliamentary group was almost involuntary as his MPs turned themselves into socks and vests and buttock-clinging shorts moulded around Joseph Muscat’s will.
How could anyone give that up? Why would they?
And then, some five days after he drove away from Castille for the last time in the Alfa Romeo hoisting the national flag, we learnt he showed up in his old office again facing down his successor and defining terms for the government’s engagement with Steward Health Care.
That was an aha moment. Joseph Muscat had not really left. It is not beyond imagination for a prime minister to grab the phone and ask some questions of his predecessor, particularly (though by no means necessarily) if they belong to the same party.
But there was something altogether different happening here. For the former prime minister to take on the brief of a company the new prime minister should be locked in a dispute with the same week he resigned is not normal at all.
In fact, it is just as abnormal as anything about Joseph Muscat’s premiership has been. The manner of his leaving office has been as anti-historical, unethical and perverted as his occupying it for as long as he did.
Now we find out he is spending hours in his old Castille boardroom white-boarding the future of our economy after the lifting of the Covid-19 restrictions. The Auberge de Castille must be the last place on earth that considers Joseph Muscat as some economic miracle worker.
The rest of us have understood what “Muscatonomics” – as that pathetic lapdog of his Edward Zammit Lewis had called it – was really about.
The manual was straightforward: dismantle law enforcement so crooks can get away with anything; dispense with environmental limitations; close one eye to crime and both to the laundering of its proceeds; make sure your friends are taken care of stuffed with public moneys; rig public procurement to favour those who bribe you; and sell passports to crooks.
I won’t bother adding blockchain to that list because that proved as ephemeral as the smile of a new born who has just farted.
All the other successful economic activities – white-listed financial services, non-mafioso gaming, aviation maintenance, tourism, movie-making and so on – were an inheritance boosted by EU and eurozone membership that he spent his entire career attempting to resist.
The Muscatonomics program landed us in the quagmire we were in when Joseph Muscat resigned. We became a black spot known the world over for low-cunning thievery. For the world we became archetypal wormy schemers like the Ferengi in the Star Trek universe or a brood of albino lab mice who chose two of us called Pinky and the Brain to take over the world. Joseph Muscat is Pinky. Keith Schembri, his grey-faced Barney Rubble, the real Brain. I half-heartedly apologise for all the meshed-up metaphors.
Robert Abela told us our country would turn the page. We were told our politics would be clean and criminality would be pushed out of power. We were told there would be no impunity. We were told we would earn the world’s respect again.
Few of us thought that meant Joseph Muscat would face consequences for what he did. The rest of us were right. Joseph Muscat never left. This was a switcheroo like Validimir Putin had played when he pretended to be his sidekick Dimitri Medvedev’s number 2 for a while only to come back stronger than ever.
You can see now why the Maltese flag had to be ripped away from the hands of protesters that thronged Valletta last November and December and hung instead by mindless disciples of the Labour Party out of their balconies to regroup behind the cult of the strong Labour leader.
You can see now why organisers of those protests had to be targeted and discredited so vehemently and why Repubblika who had a role in those protests now had to become the enemy of the people.
In what world that remembers what this country went through barely 6 months ago, could a government still hire Neville Gafà to fill the gaping holes in our diplomatic service laid bare by Evarist Bartolo?
In what world that remembers Joseph Muscat obstructing justice after the corrupt granting of an energy monopoly to the person who paid bribes to his office and killed the journalist that uncovered it all, could the same Joseph Muscat be asked to plan our future economy?
In what world that remembers that Joseph Muscat was toppled after a sustained civil society campaign of protests could the man with no answers make his way back into power so soon?
You can see it on the whiteboard: construction, money laundering, tax dodging, misdirected public expenditure and the unrelenting auctioning of what remains of this country after the ravenous greed of the last 7 years.
It’s time to look for that stake.