John Dalli joins the Partit Laburista

DalliPL has a nice ring to it doesn't it?

My theory about politicians who unsuccessfully run for the party leadership is that they are never quite the same afterwards. The exhilarating experience of being so close to the prize during the run up and yet so far from it the instant the result is announced, marks your political soul for life.

Depending on their character and disposition, men deal with this burden differently. Guido de Marco who lost the PN leadership to Eddie Fenech Adami did so by generating as much personal glory from the offices he subsequently occupied, sometimes too much. Yet he always remained impeccably loyal to the man he lost to.

Lino Spiteri lost to Alfred Sant in shady circumstances in 1992. He then spent years nursing his bitter fate and honing a revenge strategy. Shrewdly waiting for Labour to win the 1996 election, he first accepted a top ministerial post and then struck with lethal precision. Just five months after he was appointed - when dark clouds were already looming in the distance over Sant's government - he resigned for no apparent reason. I still remember his carefully contained glee as he sat next to his flustered prime minister at the press conference announcing his departure. Spiteri then relaxed on backbench and watched the spectacle of Sant's government unraveling with even more carefully contained glee.

Fate sometimes smiles on a party leadership runner up. Finding himself at the right place at the right time, the is given the best possible palliative care soon after the blow. George Abela is one of them. He walked out of the PL headquarters in Hamrun as a loser and straight into the Presidential palace. You can still see him cracking that charmingly wry smile of his at PL party delegates.

Others, like Louis Galea - who ran for the PN leadership more out of historical necessity than ambition - are not so lucky. He had to lick his wounds all by himself. Yet when he sat for the loyalty test from hell - seeing the palliative care being handed to George Abela rather than him - he passed it with noble and stoic flying colours.

And then there is John Dalli. The runner up who never recovered, and never will. Since he lost the PN leadership race seven years ago his life has been one relentless campaign to undermine the government run by the man who won. In this case, the condition is terminal and no palliative care works. Even after the winner made him EU Commissioner with a €19,909.89/month salary plus allowances, giving him more power in Continental terms than he himself has as Malta's PM - and, incidentally, passing over Richard Cachia Caruana, one of the best minds this country has - Dalli still called his sojourn in Brussels 'a four year sentence'. The gnawing rot in the man's soul just won't go away. If anything it is getting worse.

Lacking the self-control, subtlety and shrewdness of a Lino Spiteri, John Dalli gives his game away at every turn. Now, after seven years, his bitterness has so intoxicated him that he's not even noticing how blindingly obvious he's making it. Like the dead drunk at the back of an empty bar at two o'clock in the morning, he argues with the barman that he's perfectly sober. Just take a look at this.

In a truly awful Times opinion piece on Libya (click: Libya - looking-ahead) John Dalli refers to the government as "the GonziPN propaganda machine". He also addresses a Sunday Times columnist as "an apologist of GonziPN".

It's official now. In effect, John Dalli has joined the Partit Laburista.