The Malta Independent on Sunday
Brazen is as brazen does
Over the past week, I have felt we are living a sort of dual reality.
In one world, I read the news portals and newspapers which are packed with stories, some of them on the front page, about how the Prime Minister says it is up to the Police Commissioner to decide whether to investigate Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri – and this with Mizzi standing right there behind him, as though all of this were entirely normal. I read about how a journalist turned up at Police HQ and tried to get answers from the Police Commissioner. I listen to the chairman and deputy chairman of the European Parliament’s PANA Committee, calling Schembri’s behaviour “outrageous” and “a scandal”, describing Mizzi’s explanations as “very weird” and challenging both of them to resign. I see how Brian Tonna, the accountant who glues all this together, is busy running away from reporters with one excuse after another, giving the impression that he is under siege. I talk to fellow journalists who are onto the stories, have conversations with people in the street and in cafes who are disgusted at what is going on.
Then in that other world, I hear (and report) that Keith Schembri has flown to Switzerland for the weekend with his wife. As I’m reading about Mario Frendo’s attempts to get answers from the Police Commissioner, I receive an email from a reader who’s standing in the queue at the airport, with a photograph of the Police Commissioner attached, saying he’s flying out to watch his favourite football team, Inter, play Roma in Milan. I don’t know what the Prime Minister and Konrad Mizzi are up to for relaxation this weekend, but yesterday I walked into a restaurant in Mdina, for a very late lunch, and sat down at a table directly opposite Brian Tonna, in his exercise gear and running shoes, sitting there unperturbed with a girlfriend half his age and a bottle of wine. He was a little less unperturbed after I walked in, I’ll give him that, but still. He’s the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons, and he’s behaving as though he has nothing to worry about, that he has complete immunity from investigation. He’s lucky he’s not easily recognised – Malta is jam-packed with completely bald men, to the point where a distinguishing characteristic is one no longer – because that kind of defiance really rubs people the wrong way when they’re angry already. When you think – with very good reason – that somebody should be in jail or at least facing investigation, prosecution and a complicated trial, the last thing you want is to walk into a restaurant and see that person knocking back the wine with a gullible young woman, large black shades ready on the table for the big disguise when you leave the place.
To quote Ana Gomes, the PANA Committee’s deputy chairman, it’s outrageous. And it’s also very, very weird. *** One of the worst aspects of all that’s going on is that we can’t escape an increasingly obvious fact: that the Prime Minister and his coterie have discounted public opinion completely. They do not feel that they are accountable to the electorate. They are clearly thinking only in terms of the quantifiable electoral support they need to pull through, and don’t give a damn beyond that. This is extremely dangerous, because it flings out of the window one of the most basic underpinnings of democracy: that those who govern us do so only because we allow them to; that they are accountable to us at all times, and that they know, at all times, that they have to respect and honour this accountability.
But what we have instead is a Prime Minister, his key minister, his chief of staff and their aides who are contemptuous about our concerns, who carry on blithely by, who defy us and worse, who employ people specifically to insult and abuse those of us who voice our objections. Yes, it is very weird. Yes, it is outrageous, Yes, it is a scandal. The sooner we can boot them out, the better. And let’s hope it’s not in six years’ time, because Malta will not come out alive at the other end of that particular tunnel.