The President appeared on a television interview show earlier this week, defending his position with regard to his wife’s personal assistant, who is also his daughter-in-law’s sister.

He appears not to understand, but perhaps he is disingenuous, that the real issue is not so much the attempt at getting Miss Darleen Zerafa’s flights and expenses paid for by the Community Chest Fund (though that, too), but the way the presidential office appears to have been taken over, to a certain extent, by the Zerafa sisters.

One of them, the now famous Darleen, is a graduate in pharmacy, but for some reason she has taken a salaried position as personal assistant to the First Lady, and is also, via that position, secretary to the Community Chest Fund board, because the First Lady is deputy chairman.

The husband of another sister, Alison Zerafa – she has kept her maiden name – has been engaged as chauffeur to the President himself. And then of course there is Lydia, who is married to the President’s son, Robert. Lydia Abela is a senior Labour Party official and much in favour with the party leader and prime minister, Joseph Muscat, who is the one who gave her that position within the party. I believe there is little doubt, with this situation going on, that through her, the Labour leader and prime minister has a certain amount of access to the presidency, and it is possible that he also has influence and leverage. That ‘speech from the throne’, which caused the president so much embarrassment, and which was supplied to him at least two days before he read it out, is a case in point.

The President might think that engaging his daughter-in-law’s relatives in positions of trust, where they are exposed to intimate situations and to information, is the right and proper thing to do to save him from potential embarrassment. In fact, as things turned out and have shown him, the opposite is true. It appears to those standing on the outside and looking in that has surrounded himself with family in paid positions of trust. It doesn’t look good at all, and it reflects badly, too, on his daughter-in-law, the Labour Party official. The whole situation is unfortunate.

‘They did it too’ is no argument

The long, long list of appointments made by this government is embarrassing to read. In the electoral campaign, and for the five years beforehand, the Labour Party spoke loudly of meritocracy and oligarchy, and now it has done the worst thing possible: go back on all that and make choices that are as appalling as possible. It is not so much that its appointees are overtly Labour. It is that most of them have been selected precisely because they are Labour, for so many of them are really unfit and would never have been picked out in a proper selection process with an interview board.

There would be nothing wrong in their being Labour supporters if they were also competent and good at what they do, but their having helped bring the Labour Party to power seems to have been the primary consideration here. That is wrong. “Ah, but the others did it, too,” is their justification. Wrong. First of all, ‘the others’ did not do it too. They did not make the PN equivalent of Jason Micallef chairman of Valletta 2018. They did not give positions to the PN equivalent of people like Ronnie Pellegrini. True, there is no PN equivalent of those two, but that is beside the point.

The point is that for the Nationalist Party, competence and fitness for purpose came first. The fact that its fit and competent appointees also tended to support the PN is by the by. Fit and competent people do tend to support the Nationalist Party – or rather, tend not to support Labour. This is a hard truth to swallow, but there you go.  If you run a survey of Malta’s most competent people, they do tend not to favour the Labour Party. There is no way round this. It does not mean that the Nationalist government was busy appointing Nationalists. It just so happened that the people they appointed judged the PN to be the better choice for running the country. People like that make pragmatic decisions – they don’t support political parties like band clubs, out of personal passion, but take a clinical decision as to which party is best fit for purpose.