I cannot fight this feeling. Since Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando announced that he will not be contesting the next elections, a confused sense of pity crept up on me. I'm almost sad he's had to come to this. Sure, whatever else may have made him gravitate towards this decision, humiliation at the polls must have played a key part. In this narrow sense, he did the right thing.
But my confused sense of pity stems from some place else.
I have known JPO since the early 1990s and there were times when we were fairly close. I knew a Jeffrey who had his ego issues but had other attributes which amply compensated for them. He was charming, smart, driven and open-minded. I remember, for instance, having a long chat with him right after he turned down Eddie Fenech Adami's offer to make him parliamentary secretary in 1998. I strongly disagreed with his decision - an MP can't say no to a prime minister on such a matter - but I was struck by his determination to do what he thought was the right thing. In his mind, he had put his children's interests before politics.
But then over the years something happened to him. It is as if he became someone else, someone I could hardly recognise, let alone identify with. His thinking and behaviour assumed a sense of darkness, of disquiet and duplicitousness. Worst of all, he started being insincere with himself and that is the darkest blind alley in the human labyrinth. I wish I knew what caused this unfortunate transformation but I genuinely do not.
Now the die is cast and Jeffrey is riding to his political sunset. May he find his former self there.
2 comments:
I don't know Jeffrey personally apart from having been his patient once or twice before he entered the national political scene in 1996. So I can only judge on what I've heared or read about him.
I sense that he's still hurt at being dumped by the Nationalist party after 2008. He may still think that he won the elections for the PN (rather than almost lost it for them). I love analysing opinion polls and I distinctly remember an opinion poll a week before the Mistra scandal broke out which had the PN ahead by about 1.5% which would mean a 4,000 vote advantage. A week later this was 0.5% and it stayed at way right till the end.
I think JPO still thinks that that 0.5% was what he gained for the PN and it made him bitter being sidelined. Thats what changed his whole approach in my opinion. I also think we should be eternally grateful to him for having played a huge part in introducing divorce and bringing the discussion on civil liberties closer to home. In many ways Jeffrey's name will not be forgotten quickly.
Last week, Maltatoday was holding a poll and phoning homes. JPO figured in the questions asked. Maybe his decision to divorce from politics had something to do with the poll result that mentioned him.
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