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The PN attacks Labour on Charles Mangion’s Pender Place involvement, the MLP attacks the PN on Tony Abela’s former connections. KARL SCHEMBRI suggests that both parties should just shut up and answer for their men
Sundays can be quite fun for our newsroom whenever our front page carries stories embarrassing both the PN and the Labour Party.
In the evening news on Net TV and Super One, they usually chop off the part of the front page dealing with their dirty linen and magnify the other part instead, as if the rest of the stories treated as equally explosive by the opposing party were never published at all.
The latest case did not give us such a pleasure on Sunday. The Nationalist media did gloat on Charles Mangion’s Pender Place sale involvement as notary after he slammed it as a bad deal, but the Labourites? They only reacted three days later, only after realising that the PN was mounting a full campaign about Mangion’s gaffe.
But there was still the pleasure of omission: the PN completely ignored or rather censored the story detailing Parliamentary Secretary Tony Abela’s past business connections to a contraband and drug dealer; the story Super One would pick up somewhat belatedly mid-week to counter-attack the PN’s onslaught.
If that is funny, the follow-up to all this is just hilarious. Labour’s Deputy Leader Charles Mangion accuses MaltaToday of being in collusion with the PN, just when Super One started capitalising on the Tony Abela story to hit back at the government and the prime minister is forced to answer for the notary who’s the junior minister in his own office in charge of the armed forces.
What followed were a whole two weeks of attacks and counter-attacks on the same two stories, with both stations using almost the same language to describe the calamity that hit them: the PN is embarrassed by Abela’s past, the MLP is embarrassed by Mangion’s involvement. Everyone is embarrassed. Or are they?
Judging by their own public reaction, it seems the two parties are more concerned with what their opponents are doing than with the integrity and credibility of their own men.
The air time given on news bulletins, the emphasis, the pseudo-analysis devoted to each others’ blunders, betrays the craving both parties had for some ‘scandal’ to hit at each other, two months ahead of local elections.
According to Mangion, who had resigned under the Labour government after bypassing normal procedures to pardon a prisoner, Sant just told him “no problem” when he informed him he would be the notary on the Pender Place sale.
Internally however, the Labour party is devastated by the revelation which undermined the whole campaign against the sale of the St Julians government property, and the PN does not really know how to deal with its ministers’ skeletons in the closets which have returned to haunt them, particularly Abela’s.
What is shocking however is the total absence of the rest of the independent media and the national public broadcaster. While the two party stations spin around the stories to suit their partisan ends, the main question in the two notaries’ stories – perhaps in Mangion’s more than in Abela’s – is one of political credibility, and the more the airtime the two stations dedicate to attack each other, the more the credibility question spreads from the individuals involved to the whole party machinery. It is the same like watching Silvio Berlusconi attacking the Italian left for its obscure links with the banking world. While left-wingers must have been utterly let down by their political leaders who always assume the high moral ground on such issues, Berlusconi would be the last one to cast stones at his adversaries on shady financing.
Mangion complained with the Nationalist media that it was not distinguishing between his professional and political life. As a seasoned politician, he knows in reality there is no such distinction. It’s as if Gavin Gulia, the opposition’s spokesman on justice and vociferous critic of Fenech Adami’s presidential pardon to Zeppi l-Hafi, had to represent the same Zeppi l-Hafi in court in the jury of the attempted murder of Richard Cachia Caruana.
Whatever the lawyers say, whatever the professional jargon invoked to defend such an absurdity, it is just not done. Nothing illegal of course, just as being an alcoholic leader of the UK’s liberal democrats has no legal consequences whatsoever. It’s about political judgement and credibility. By signing the Pender Place sale as notary he effectively rendered his own criticism and the party’s ridiculous.
Abela’s story is different. It is about a politician’s partners, canvassers and friends. For a private citizen, they would be inconsequential matters left only to his or her conscience; for an MP and junior minister, they can make or break him.
Abela’s former association with a drug dealer and smuggler, even though he was not involved in the actual crimes committed by his former business partner, says a lot about how politicians tend to attract the wrong bunch. It says even more about his sense of judgement, and raises questions about one’s judgement.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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