Rehabilitate or what?

I was inspired to put some words together about the supreme irony of travelling along the perception of traffic past Mater Dei and seeing first a billboard extolling the virtues of DB’s Paceville Purlieu (look it up) and then spotting the next billboard inviting you to participate in environment-saving discussions.

But then I thought, what the heck? As long as the Great Unwashed can get their Hardrocks Off by getting burgers at DB’s emporium, what’s going to change?

On the radio, I was listening to accounts of how the British political class is currently in the throes of one of its periodic spasms of moral recall.

Peter Mandelson’s name is being uttered with sharp intakes of breath, the political equivalent of a Victorian aunt clutching her pearls and swooning onto a chaise longue.

Those who are trying to save Starmer’s skin are muttering about how this (Mandy, not Keir) is a man with a past. A problematic past. A past that need not be endlessly revisited, footnoted, litigated in the court of public memory because we all knew who and what he was.

But Starmer’s Faithful are thinning out, radically so, the old stories are being exhumed, dusted off, and paraded once more, as though the mere passage of time were an aggravating factor rather than, one might think, part of the human condition.

Let’s not make too light of it: Mandelson betrayed his country, his colleagues and his party (around here, the order of importance is often inverted).

And let’s not make light at all of the scum with whom he was cavorting, basically a child-rapist who corrupted everyone and anything within reach.

So, Mandelson’s past is being examined with the finest of fine-tooth combs now that he has crawled out from under a fetid rock like the disgusting creature he is.

What would have happened in similar circumstances here?

Here, the past is not something to be interrogated. It is something to be outgrown, moved past, contextualised, or, my personal favourite, put behind us for the sake of stability.  You can count on the fingers of half a hand the number of politicians who have been shown the door and stayed on the other side of it.

And even those are still adulated and revered by the aforementioned GUs.

Rehabilitation is not merely possible; it is positively encouraged. Indeed, the more colourful the past, the more impressive the rehabilitation narrative becomes.

The Maltese system has perfected a curious moral alchemy: what would elsewhere be treated as a permanent stain becomes, with sufficient time and the correct political lighting, a badge of worldly experience.

Former scandals are rebranded as youthful indiscretions.

Institutional failures are recast as “lessons learned”.

Those who once presided over very public messes are welcomed back into polite society with the air of men (and a few women) who have merely returned from a long lunch.

There is, of course, something humane in the idea that people should not be eternally defined by their worst moment. Redemption is a civilised concept. So is forgiveness.

But these ideas only retain meaning if they are applied honestly and consistently.

What Malta practises instead is not forgiveness but amnesia with benefits, like some friends of friends.

We do not ask whether rehabilitation has occurred; we simply assert that it has.  The past is “forgotten” not because it has been resolved, but because remembering it is inconvenient in the extreme.

This is why watching the Mandelson furore from here feels faintly surreal.

British politics can be sanctimonious. It often is.

But sanctimony, irritating as it may be, is at least an acknowledgement that history matters.

Here, by contrast, we congratulate ourselves on being pragmatic. On being grown-up. On not “rehashing the past”.

The result is not stability but stagnation. Not reconciliation but repetition.

So by all means, let us believe in rehabilitation. And in the Easter Bunny, while bearing in mind that we have to remember that memory, like justice, is uncomfortable by design.

We tamper with it at our peril.

And just to show that mine hasn’t been tampered with, I recall for your delectation that a certain Muscat, Joseph, crowned royalty (as in King of… fill in yourself) had bestowed upon the sleaze bag, Mandelson, in 2016, Ġieħ ir-Repubblika.   For sure, at the time, Muscat didn’t know about the sleaze within that bag, but isn’t the irony delicious?