Pot calling kettle, do you read me…

Stephen Colbert, the host of The Late Show, recently staged a ‘debate’ between two candidates running for the Republican nomination for US President. The two candidates were Donald Trump, and… Donald Trump.

The results were really quite something. For instance:

Q. Donald, what are your thoughts on Ted Cruz (your nearest rival in the race)?

A. Ted Cruz is a nasty guy. Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody anywhere likes him when they get to know him…

Over to you now, Mr Trump.

A. I like Ted Cruz a lot, I really do…

And on it went:

Q. Donald: how do you assess Hillary Clinton’s experience in foreign policy?

A. Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States.

Mr Trump, your thoughts:

A. Hillary Clinton is a terrific woman… I think she does a really good job, and I like her…

It’s almost like an immutable law of physics. For each Donald Trump opinion, there will be an equal and opposite Donald Trump opinion. 

Which brings us to the truly remarkable thing about Colbert’s little experiment. It was, of course, satire… Colbert asked generic questions, then used recorded clips from actual Trump speeches, press conferences and TV interviews as ‘answers’. But even if the context was fabricated and the quotes selected arbitrarily… the contradictions themselves were real. Trump really did say all those conflicting things… and far from laughing hysterically – as the studio audience did during the ‘debate’ – the American people seem to be taking Donald Trump (both versions) very seriously indeed as a possible future President. 

At the time of writing he has only just come in second in the Iowa caucus – immediately after boycotting a live TV debate – and still has a decent (though admittedly unlikely) chance of winning the nomination.

It is not just Donald Trump, then, who seems to suffer from split personality disorder. The entire American electorate seems to have the same intrinsic identity problem. They can see, and laugh at, the remarkable inconsistency in this man’s record…yet still vote for him when the time comes, without any sense of contradiction.

To a very great degree, the situation here in Malta is identical. Perhaps the only difference is that you don’t actually need a Stephen Colbert to dig up the contradictions and edit them all into an observable whole. As a rule, Maltese politicians are only quite happy to do all that work for us themselves.

Take, for instance, a televised debate on ‘Reporter’ this week. Unlike Colbert’s, it was not satirical. We had the Home Affairs minister and shadow minister sparring over the situation in prison, among other things. Nothing funny about it at all.

Yet the effect was uncannily similar. Either both Carmelo Abela and Beppe Fenech Adami have inexplicably suffered amnesia as a result of some blow to the head … or, like Donald Trump, they are both more than one person at the same time.

Let’s start with our first two contestants: Dr Beppe and Mr Fenech Adami. Both hit out at their rivals – Dr Carmelo and Mr Abela – over the appalling conditions at Malta’s only prison, the Corradino Correctional Facility.

Quite rightly, too. The situation in prison is indeed very alarming. There have been outbreaks of food poisoning, influenza and swine flu. The police have (briefly) refused to attend to prison escort duties for fear of infection. There have been at least three suicide cases in police custody in the past few months alone. 

What this effectively means, however, is that the situation in prison has remained entirely unchanged since the days when Beppe Fenech Adami’s party was in government. Admittedly he was not the responsible minister at the time, so perhaps he may be forgiven for clearly never having looked at Corradino prison even once before, in his entire political career.

I look there once in a while, and the situation described by Fenech Adami is precisely the sort of thing that has gone on uninterruptedly – in most cases, unreported – throughout the PN’s 25-year stint in government.

The only difference is that we’re only getting to know some of the details now. I had reported on one prison suicide (that of Barry Lee, in 2010) that had been kept secret by the (then) Justice and Home Affairs Ministry). I’ve only just discovered that this was but one of 27 attempts that have since gone unreported at Malta’s prison: most of them before the last election, when responsibility for prison management lay directly with the Nationalist government.

Why didn’t Fenech Adami call for the Justice Minister’s resignation then, as he does now? He was sitting right next to Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici in parliament at the time. He could have even whispered it into his ear…

But no: not a whisper. The party which presided over a (literally) crumbling prison facility – parts of which actually collapsed a couple of years ago, with the result that the visitors’ section had to be relocated – and which allowed Malta’s punitive justice system to regress back to the pre-enlightenment age, now suddenly stands vigilant against any form of mismanagement or abuse at Corradino. Without a trace of irony anywhere to be seen…

It is every bit as remarkable as Trump expressing both admiration and contempt for Hillary Clinton in the same breath. The only thing missing is the studio audience laughter.

Nor was this the only staggering contradiction to emerge from this debate. Beppe Fenech Adami somehow also claimed that a “crisis in the police force” has also led to an ever-increasing “sense of lawlessness” in Paceville… culminating in last November’s accident at the PlusOne nightclub.

Erm… last November’s accident was caused by a teenage prank gone horribly wrong, and insufficient safety precautions (among other things) at the club. The club’s owner and several staff members have in fact just been charged in court.

As for the police crisis… police presence in Paceville had been increased, not decreased, prior to the accident. A new police station has been opened in Swieqi since the last election – for which the PN can take some credit, as it had first started things moving. Much more significantly, the standards of health and safety – both in terms of regulations, and levels of enforcement – have not changed one iota since around the early 1990s: when the smoking ban was first introduced. The magisterial enquiry report made all this very apparent.

Yet somehow, an accident that had been waiting to happen for at least 20 years – which is also roughly how long Beppe Fenech Adami’s government had ignored both Paceville, and health and safety in general – can suddenly be blamed squarely on the police under Labour. 

Not even Trump would manage a logic as utterly warped as that.

Speaking of magisterial enquiries, however…. we must turn attention to the other side of the debate. 

The present administration, it will be remembered, recently published two magisterial inquiry reports: one into the aforementioned Paceville accident, and the other into the Paqpaqli Ghall-Istrina supercar crash last October. 

Yet, curiously, Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela (and his sidekick, Carmelo Abela) chose not to publish a third magisterial inquiry this week: this time into – my, what a coincidence – a suicide in police custody. That’s right: the very same issue Abela has also just chastised Fenech Adami’s former government for ‘covering up’…

This is where a Stephen Colbert might ask: so, Dr Abela: why exactly is it so reprehensible for the Nationalist government to cover up suicide cases in prison… but not for you to do exactly the same thing, right now?

And seeing as the last two enquiries resulted in criminal culpability being assigned, with charges pressed against several persons…what about this one? Bear in mind that the victim, in this case, was actually on ‘suicide watch’ at the Forensic Ward at Mount Carmel Hospital. The inquiry was supposed to establish whether procedures were followed, and why they clearly didn’t work.

Naturally I don’t know what the inquiry concluded – nobody does, except the magistrate and the minister – but keeping it secret might give the impression that some people are being protected from criminal liability, while others aren’t.

This was, after all, the same reason the Labour government chose to campaign primarily on ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ at the last election: to remove even the suspicion of maladministration.

But… what am I even saying? That was Labour in opposition before 2013.This is Labour in government in 2016. And like Donald and Mr Trump: they’re not the same thing at all.