Thrusting Robert Abela

“Trust in me…’’ Kaa the silky python sibilantly hissed in The Jungle Book, resulting in a favourite catchphrase while we were at uni, with an added ‘h’ in what we fondly thought was daring innuendo. What can I say? It was the 70s.

In taking the same position as Kaa, Robert Abela has perfected the political art of asking a question so stupidly loaded that the crowd practically answers before he opens his mouth. Leave aside that he’s also making it clear that he feels little more than contempt for the other people on the ballot sheets.

Last Sunday, like some bargain-basement televangelist harvesting applause from the emotionally over-invested, he stood before the Labour faithful and thundered his great rhetorical masterpiece: “Who would you trust to run the country? Me or the other guy, the one whose strides in the leadership of the PN made me call the elections a year early?

And right on cue came the sycophantic roar from the assembled masses, that warm tidal wave of approval from people who apparently mistake patronage for governance and corruption fatigue for economic vision.

Trust him? Absolutely. I trust Robert Abela completely.

I trust him to go softly on corruption, because he has spent years demonstrating precisely that instinct. I trust him to ensure that the right people remain untouchable.

I trust him to maintain the strange Maltese political tradition where scandals arrive daily, but accountability is treated like an exotic foreign import that got stuck in customs.

I trust him to surround himself with mediocrities and political twerps who would struggle to run a stationery kiosk without collapsing into factional warfare and procurement irregularities.

I trust him to continue operating the government as a private rave at some exotic location wrapped in cheap LED lighting and fireworks.

I trust him to vanish, bob off on his luxury yacht the moment inconvenience approaches, his fuel subsidised by taxpayers, who pay their taxes while being lectured about sacrifice by ministers discovering ever more creative definitions of “ethics”.

I trust him to continue governing Malta like a man who inherited it from an obscure Sicilian uncle in a will nobody quite saw signed. And above all, I trust him to ensure that Joseph Muscat never truly has to fear consequences.

Because that is the real point, isn’t it?

The ghost at every Labour mass meeting is not Dom Mintoff, not Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, not Alfred Sant.

It is Joseph Muscat, gurning on Insta with the oily confidence of a man who knows the system remains structurally incapable of touching him while his protégé occupies Castille.

That is the unspoken pact underpinning modern Labour politics. Prosperity theatre outside. Protection machinery inside.

The roads are crumbling, the planning system resembles organised vandalism, institutions wheeze under political pressure, public standards have dissolved into parody, and every fresh scandal is treated not as a disqualifying event but merely as another communications challenge to be managed until the next ribbon-cutting exercise.

Meanwhile, Abela swans from announcement to announcement like a man flinging confetti from a float at carnival: subsidies here, cheques there, another “benefit,” another “scheme,” another confected sugar rush designed to keep the electorate pleasantly high while the country’s long-term credibility quietly crumbles in the background, while Finance Minister Clyde Caruana having been shunted away to worry about what the PN would do.

And Abela asks whether we trust him. That, perhaps, is the funniest part. Because the question answers itself.

To answer that, we have to answer whether we want more of the same. More swaggering impunity? More grinning former prime ministers pretending history, like them, has no memory? More corruption normalised because the economy still has enough momentum to keep the lights on?

All that glitters in Abela’s Malta is very starkly not gold. It is brass polished for television cameras. It is a cheap sheen masking institutional rot. It is, in effect, a bet placed on the dodgy prediction market designed to appeal to the making a quick buck instinct that pervades the psyche of those who gravitate Labour-wards.

So yes, Prime Minister. Thank you for the question. Do you really need my answer?