Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s the thought of adjusting after two weeks of holiday. I woke up today with an acute case of Monday morning blues. Maybe you have as well. But however dark your day is, it’s better than Aaron Farrugia’s. He’s newly unemployed. He can’t ride that grey Tesla anymore. And if he’s still paying his mortgage he needs to sort himself out pretty quickly.
I remember a former PN minister who ended up in the same situation despite his relative youth. In a post-election reshuffle, the PM offered this guy a smaller department in what would have been a public humiliation because of serious performance issues during the previous term. The soon to be former minister rejected the demotion thinking he’d be better off without a government job rather than with a smaller one. The usual words of thanks were said and the former minister found himself at job interviews attempting to assure his incredulous interviewers that he quit government because he wanted to, not because he had been kicked out for being a cunt.
I don’t know why Aaron Farrugia’s been fired. It’s really a bit of a mystery. He’s by no means a whiz kid. He’s clearly been over-promoted too quickly and far beyond his capabilities. Though Robert Abela couldn’t possibly admit fitting in that description just as handsomely, surely the PM realises that if utterly unjustified precociousness was a reason to fire his ministers, more than two-thirds of them would have to go as well.
As I’ve often written here, and speaking with the bitterness of personal experience, transport is anyone’s last job in politics. Aaron Farrugia was ideally suited for the role of popular scapegoat for every bloody traffic jam we were stuck in. That’s the fate of transport ministers. As one Michael Portillo once put it, when you’re transport minister and someone is late for a meeting with you, you are expected to apologise to them.
But Aaron Farrugia’s particular brand of smugness and self-importance just bloody asked for it. He’s the untranslatable tad-daqqiet ta’ ħarta.
But surely that can’t be the reason for Farrugia’s career end. No one in the government appears to have better ideas on how to manage the country’s transportation inferno. Chris Bonnet may be spraying his shorts with excitement this morning but he’ll be ducking behind his driver’s seat to avoid being seen by angry motorists stuck in the same traffic jam soon enough.
So, the question remains. What did Aaron Farrugia do? Why has he been thrown out? Why is the career of this young apparatchik who until Friday imagined was very much a rising star so suddenly over?
That question has an answer. Not one I know, I’m afraid, nor is it an answer we can expect to hear about if the prime minister can avoid it. But this feels like damage limitation, and given how damaging the limiting is, Robert Abela must be hoping to avert some serious disaster.
The PM’s claim that Aaron Farrugia’s removal is an act of blameless sacrifice on the altar of “injecting new blood” is just not believable. Cabinet is massive. It’s a bloated orphanage for barely adequate pubescent loyalists for whom Aaron Farrugia is no less than an archetype.
He’ll be telling interviewees he left the government because he wanted to. They’ll be wondering how naughty he must have been to have been fired by the prime minister who calls Joseph Muscat “sieħbi”.