The impression

The impression this country gets is that there is an inner group around the Prime Minister which can do no wrong.

The impression this country gets is that there is a small group around the Prime Minister which gets to get any appointment going.

The impression this country gets is that there is a small group around the Prime Minister who has some sort of assurance that whatever mistake they make, they will be defended till doomsday. We will not go into the comparisons game: we will not compare this lot with the one that preceded it. That one got the deserts it deserved. This one got elected through promising it would do nothing of the sort and that it was ready to work with one and all, regardless of their political convictions.

Let us give this government the benefit of doubt, that it really believed what it was saying before the elections and that it had no intention of tricking the electorate (Not all would be this magnanimous).

It is a fact that there have been good,

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reliable, honest people who were eased out so that their places could be taken by people more in tune with the winning party. It would seem that the ministers themselves were quite inundated with requests from people eager to get employment with the government in the ministries and that they were too weak to carry out any sort of filter to rule out the ones who could get the government in trouble. In fact, they did not filter and as a result the government was lumped with many undesirables. Then over and above these run-of-themill people, there is a super circle of people who are near OPM, not the ministries as such, and these are the super-appointees – those with a higher, over-arching placing and who alone share in the grand vision of their leader for themselves, if not for the country as a whole. This is just an impression, remember. These people can do nothing wrong, and, if they happen to have done any wrong, it will be denied till hell freezes over. The people in the higher reaches of Castille have no idea how much this impression is prevalent and how much damage it is doing to the party and the government.

Again, we are taking about impressions here, but the impression a dispassionate observer gets is that there was no real planning done except the very generic roadmap – that could be written on the back of an envelope – how to cut the electricity rates and thus generate some growth and all would live happily ever after.

If one is forced to compare, there is just no comparison between today’s OPM coterie and the tight ship run in Eddie’s and Gonzi’s time. Those people had their faults, but one would never imagine them venturing into private businesses under the cover of government business. And if there happened to be a bad apple among them in all those 25 years, they would not have lasted an hour after their ill-deed got found out. There, this is the distance between then and now.