Yes, Rosianne Cutajar should resign: even just so we can all take a break for Christmas...

By the time you read this, it will probably be December 24. You know: ‘… the night before Christmas, when all through the house/not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…’

Even as a small child, I was always curious to know what made poet Clement Clarke Moore so very sure about that. ‘Not even a mouse’, huh? How the heck would he know, anyway? Does he have an in-built radar system, detecting the movement of every last member of the ‘Mus musculus’ genus with a radius of 50 yards…?

And in any case: why should mice, of all things, even give a damn if it’s Christmas Eve or not? They’re not exactly ‘Christians’, you know. (And no, they’re not pagans, either: so that whole spiel about ‘Christmas being a much older, mid-Winter tradition’ doesn’t really count here, either).

No… they’re mice. Small, furry rodents that nibble at things. And if you ask me, Christmas Eve is actually the perfect time for a house-mouse to be ‘stirring’. After all, there will be mince pies (and maybe a glass of Brandy) on the mantlepiece, intended for Father Christmas when he comes down the chimney; there will be Christmas hampers to gnaw into; and there will almost certainly be at least one untouched Christmas pudding, or half-eaten Panettone, somewhere to be discovered, too…

No, no: make no mistake. Christmas Eve must be just as important a Mid-Winter Festival for mice, as it is for humans. Heck, they probably even look forward to it all year round, with as much excitement and anticipation as little human children: not, perhaps, because it commemorates ‘the birth of Christ’ (though to be fair, that’s hardly the reason most humans celebrate Christmas, either) but because…

…well, what is ‘Christmas Eve’ to a mouse, anyway: if not a sudden, inexplicable bonanza of free goodies, dotted all over the house, which just suddenly materializes out of nowhere at all: and even then, only on this one particular night of the year (and never at any other time)?

So even from a tiny mouse’s point of view, there must be something a little ‘magical’ about this time of year... and that, I suppose, was the whole point Clarke Moore was all along trying to make (though he did use a bit too much poetic licence when making it).

Christmas is – or is supposed to be – a ‘magical’ time of the year. And yes, granted: a lot of its ancestral magic has since been buried beneath layers of overt, undisguised consumerism – or drowned out by ghastly Christmas songs, such as ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ (to which I am always tempted to reply: ‘Yes, Mariah, my sentiments exactly: ‘All I want for Christmas is you… TO SHUT THE F*** UP!’)…

… but while most of the magic has been irretrievably lost, some of it has still survived the onslaught (or should have survived, at any rate). Whether your interpretation of Christmas is rooted in ‘Christian’ or ‘Pagan’ traditions – or both, or neither – there is still a time-honoured tradition of observing some kind of ‘truce’, or ‘ceasefire’ over the festive season.

It is a historical fact, for instance, that on Christmas Day 1914, British and German soldiers emerged from their trenches for long enough to play a friendly football match… (just as it is an equally historical fact that the Germans actually won that game, by a final score of 2-nil. Some things just never change at all, do they?)

And yet, while Christmas clearly had enough magic to temporarily halt even a World War, until around 106 years ago… so that people could at least take a short break from trying to kill each other, day after day, using a combination of machine guns, bayonets, grenades, tanks, heavy artillery and even poison gas (that sort of thing gets tiring after a while, you know)… well, just look at us today.

Just three shorts days to go before Christmas morning, and… Ker-BOOM! Another political scandal erupts like artillery fire; and just like that, we’re all back in our own little political trenches: where we have all been anyway, almost uninterruptedly, for at least four years now…

I don’t know. It all seems so darn… selfish, to me. It’s almost like they’re doing it all on purpose: like they’re deliberately timing the emergence of these things, specifically to ruin everyone’s fun over the festive season…

Take Rosianne Cutajar herself, for instance. I won’t even go into the issue of whether an elected MP (also a junior member of Cabinet) should enter into any private, undeclared business transactions with ‘prominent members of the business community’ (who also happen, at the time, to be deeply intertwined with at least one international money-laundering scandal, featuring other ‘prominent members’ of her own government)…

Nor will I waste any time questioning the ethics (or, for that matter, legality) of her actions, because… well, Rosianne Cutajar herself is ‘sort of’ denying the allegations – though at the same time, she ‘sort of’ isn’t – and in any case: there is still an ongoing investigation by the Standards Commissioner… just as there is still room to question whether any further investigations (including, say, by the Commissioner for Inland Revenue, or the Police’s Financial Crimes Unit) may also take place in future...

As things stand, however, one thing does seem to emerge quite clearly. At one point, Rosianne Cutajar seems to have taken a conscious decision to enter into some kind of business transaction involving Yorgen Fenech. So, even before we get to the part about the alleged cash-payment, and the alleged refusal to reimburse the sum later… the question I would ask is:

Did it not even remotely occur to her, at the time, that:

a) these things also have a tendency to come out in public, sooner or later (especially when she herself goes on to ignore a legal letter demanding the reimbursement of a EUR50,000 commission… the existence of which letter, on its own, places the matter squarely within the public domain), and;

b) quite possibly, a concatenation of unlikely events would also conspire for this explosive revelation to come out precisely on 19 December 2020: i.e., just in time to ruin everybody’s Christmas (which, in any case, has already been pre-emptively dampened by all this COVD-19 anxiety)?

No, of course not. See what I mean? Politicians never think about stuff like that. They only ever think about themselves…

Same goes for the Prime Minister, naturally. For while I can more or less understand Rosianne Cutajar’s reluctance to resign… because it is, after all, her own head on the block… well, there’s nothing stopping Robert Abela from insisting on her resignation, is there?

Especially considering that he has, in the past, taken similar decisions himself: as was the case with Justyne Caruana, for instance… and as, once upon a time, had been the case with Chris Said (this time, under former Prime Minister Larwrence Gonzi).

Leaving aside that ‘removing Rosianne Cutajar’ – even if just pending the inquiry outcome – is also a political necessity in its own right, given all the ramifications of this particular case… well, has it ever occurred to Abela that he also should consider doing it, just to postpone the actual controversy itsel… at least, long enough for the rest of us to try and actually enjoy this year’s festive season, for a change?

Silly question, I suppose.  It never occurs to these people that there is, after all, not much point in having loud, angry choruses demanding a particular politician’s resignation… when that particular politician has already done the right thing, and (albeit temporarily) resigned.

Even more than Rosianne Cutajar, then, Robert Abela could very easily have… if not ‘halted’, at least ‘muffled’ this latest artillery barrage: and in so doing, allow us all the chance to actually crawl out of our bomb-shelters, and maybe experience at least one truly ‘Silent Night’, after four whole years of uninterrupted political warfare.

But no. Given the choice between ‘calming down the situation’ – thereby going some distance towards ‘preserving the magic of Christmas’ - and the political mileage he can expect to get by defending one of his generals (from what his own foot-soldiers will no doubt interpret as ‘poison-gas’ attacks from the opposite trenches)…

… he chose to keep the controversy alive. You know, just to make sure that if COVID-19 won’t ‘kill Christmas’ this year… something else will instead.

I mean, come on. It’s not exactly as though there weren’t already enough Grinches out there, trying to steal our Christmas this year…