Robert Abela’s move on the Chief Justice post

I am conscious of my reputation for shooting my mouth off and thereby (not much) endearing myself to all and sundry. The record is public and searchable: The Beck archive, and the now-mercifully-abandoned Twitter and Facebook posts from before I lost interest in paddling around those particular cesspits.

You might therefore expect me to weigh in, with my usual lack of restraint, on the merits and demerits of the various candidates for appointment to the honourable, if thankless, office of Chief Justice.

That expectation would be misplaced. Even at this stage of my life, I am not quite naïve enough to start piddling into the very pond in which I continue, against all odds, to ply my trade.

Still, abstaining from comment on candidates does not require a similar vow of silence on conduct. And it is at least permissible to observe, without asserting, that the Prime Minister’s handling of his expression of preference for Judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera raises certain questions.

One way of reading the Prime Minister’s subsequent insistence that no gentleman’s agreement existed with the Opposition Leader is to take him at his word: that no understanding, formal or informal, ever arose, and that therefore nothing was breached. That reading is available, and I do not say it is wrong. Much.

But it is not the only reading.

Because when politicians traditionally invoke a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, they do so in reference not to legal enforceability but to convention, to shared assumptions about discretion, restraint, and good faith. I was brought up to understand that such conventions were bound precisely because they were not written down.

That understanding, of course, predates the modern political doctrine according to which you cannot be criticised for acting unethically provided you have complied with the strict letter of the law. Conventions, on this view, are optional extras.

Seen through that lens, it becomes possible, although not inevitable, to interpret the Prime Minister’s position as resting on a narrow literalism; that once a name entered the public domain, any expectation of discretion dissolved, and with it any obligation to behave as though confidentiality still mattered.

Whether that is a convincing position is open to debate. What is harder to dispute is that once confidentiality is gone, any supposed convention, real or imagined, is rendered meaningless in practice.

At that point, another speculative interpretation suggests itself. This is my interpretation, not an assertion of Abela’s intent, needless to say.

It is not inconceivable that the initial nominee was never intended to be the final outcome. She may have functioned as a provisional name – a trial balloon, a stalking horse – introduced to test reactions, absorb resistance, and reframe the terrain on which the real decision would later be taken.

If that were so, the objective would not have been consensus, but calibration. Put forward a name for which you do not intend to expend serious political capital. Allow the opposition, the press, and civil society to exhaust themselves in reaction. Then, once fatigue sets in, return with the real nominee, then positioned as the reasonable, stabilising alternative to further controversy.

In such circumstances, any subsequent reluctance by the Opposition to agree could be characterised, however unfairly, as obstruction. That this characterisation might play well in a soundbite-driven environment is not a controversial observation.

None of this is to say that such a strategy was deployed. But it is a way, perhaps an uncharitable one, but not an irrational one, of making sense of the sequence of events.

If inclined to view matters in that light, the Prime Minister’s sudden punctiliousness about the technical (non) existence of a gentleman’s agreement might appear less like confusion worse confounded, and more like convenience.

Again, I do not say that this is what happened. I merely note that it is one possible explanation among others.

But even as a hypothesis, it invites an uncomfortable reflection: That our highest constitutional offices can become pieces in a tactical game, and that the collateral discomfort of those involved may be regarded as an acceptable cost of political manoeuvring.