Imagine for a moment that Rosianne Cutajar had been a PN, not Labour, politician. It’s not that hard. The PN has had its share of flamboyant characters caught with their hand in the till. Like her they ended up isolated from their party though unlike her it didn’t take so long, and it hadn’t gone so deep in their particular brand of scandal before they were turned away by their party.
Now that you have imagined Rosianne Cutajar ending her imaginary career in PN politics, what would you expect her next move to be? What would come next for her? I’m going to help you.
Remember real PN politicians disgraced by scandal and isolated from their party. Think of John Dalli, Jesmond Mugliett, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, Cyrus Engerer. Think of what happened to them right after (or just before) their exclusion from their party of origin. You’ve guessed it. They emerged the next day in the Labour Party. A formidable journalist had coined the phrase that Labour had become the skip for rubbish politicians.
By that token Rosianne Cutajar would now be preparing herself for a new career on the other side of the political divide.
Now snap out of this speculative alternative reality I posited and come back to the world where Rosianne Cutajar is a former politician of the Labour Party. Like Konrad Mizzi and Chris Cardona before her, she’s been disinherited by her political family. What are the chances that Rosianne Cutajar emerges tomorrow on the PN benches, starting a second political career on the other side? I’ll answer that for you. None whatsoever.
The PN may be in disarray, starved of resources, and out of touch with the benefits of its history and experience. But the PN still has the core decency of not washing away the sins of its political opponents in exchange for their conversion. True, that’s a very low bar to hold a political party against. But when Joseph Muscat embraced John Dalli, it looked to some like he had pushed to new heights the notion that politics is the art of the possible.
Look where that got him.