On the buses and the night Labour hid its own deputy

There are old wounds in Maltese politics that never quite heal. They just sit there, faintly throbbing, like a constitutional amendment nobody wants to revisit.

One of them is that surreal Xarabank evening when we’ve just been told Labour decided that its own deputy leader, Anġlu Farrugia, was apparently too risky to be allowed within three metres of a television camera.

Now, let’s be clear. Anġlu was not exactly forged in the fires of Shakespearean drama. His speeches did not cause audiences to swoon or adversaries to tremble. At times, he spoke like a man carefully unwrapping fragile crockery, after having dropped it from a great height.

But that was never the real problem: when did inept public speaking ever hinder a Maltese politician from speaking in public?

The real problem was that Anġlu might have sounded, well, let’s say uneasy.

Not revolutionary. Not rebellious. Just faintly uncomfortable with Labour’s accelerating glide into the satin-lined embrace of big business. The developers, the gaming barons, the freshly polished boardroom alliances, the makeover was well underway, and Anġlu was not its most enthusiastic poster boy, whether on the Fourth Floor or not.

So way back when, before the sun came up in 2013, instead of sending their deputy leader to debate the newly anointed PN Deputy Leader Simon Busuttil, Labour’s strategists reached for a distraction device. Not a smoke machine, something louder.

Enter Franco Debono.

At the time, he was already known for volatility, combustible interventions, and the kind of political temperament that made party whips age prematurely, and that’s putting it mildly and then some.

That night, far back in the mists of time, Xarabank collapsed into chaos. Police were called. The debate evaporated. Labour’s potentially awkward internal nuance was replaced by spectacle.

Mission accomplished, as far as Labour was concerned, with the added bonus that it looked like the PN was having internal conniptions, which helped its already vanishing chances of re-election disappear completely.

But what makes it richer, almost operatic in hindsight, is that this wasn’t a one-off flare-up. Debono has spent the better part of the last 12 years proving that volatility was not a temporary phase but a lifestyle choice.

Shooting his mouth off about governments, oppositions, institutions, personalities, reforms, conspiracies and whatever else drifted into his orbit. Always aggrieved. Always animated. Always centre-stage.  Lovin’ him is not an exercise in fondness; it’s a question of “what, him again?”

In other words, Labour back then did not accidentally unleash a loose cannon for that night only.

And there is the quiet irony.

On that stage, amid the theatrical implosion, Busuttil was the only person behaving like an adult who had shown up for an actual debate. He did not exploit the circus. He did not escalate the chaos. He simply stood there, waiting for a discussion that Labour had no intention of allowing.

You may disagree with him politically. Many did. But on that night, he was the only one who looked remotely honourable.

The quiet irony (well, not so quiet, but you know what I mean) is that Busuttil has gone and moved forward; everyone else seems to have locked themselves into the same spiral of fulmination.

The episode remains a small but telling vignette of Labour’s operational philosophy: Control the optics, neutralise the inconvenient, and if necessary, drown nuance in noise.