So the big news yesterday (the big match doesn’t qualify because it started at midnight) was that the human rights organisation, aditus, wrote to the Prime Minister, copied to the civil rights minister, to convey its strong objection to Joe Grima’s behaviour. In writing to the Prime Minister, aditus took the right and proper course of procedural action because Joe Grima is the Prime Minister’s special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation.

Aditus has demonstrated that it is keenly aware of something most Maltese are not: that people are their official positions. When Joe Grima insults aditus and its director, when he makes Islamophobic comments on his Facebook Timeline, when he expresses anti-immigrant prejudice and hatred, it is not Joe Grima doing that but the Prime Minister’s special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation. Grima’s failure to understand this cannot be more specifically illustrated than by one of his most recent Facebook comments – a photograph of the splendid evolution of the Piano project in Valletta with his verdict: “Jaqq xi kruha ta dahla ghal belt maestuza grazzi ghall miljuni li bela Renzo Piano minn fuq daharna” (Yuk, what a hideous entrance to a majestic city thanks to the millions that Renzo Piano snatched off us).

As the Maltese government’s special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation, he should be promoting and celebrating Renzo Piano’s work in the capital city, as a spectacular magnet for visitors, and not denigrating Renzo Piano and rubbishing his work in Valletta. And he should be doing this irrespective of his own personal views about that work – though I have to say that any tourism envoy so uncultured as to fail to appreciate what has been done there is most definitely in the wrong job.

Let’s reverse the order of things and put it in such a way that the Prime Minister’s special envoy might possibly understand the gravity of what he has repeatedly done. Neil Falzon, director of aditus, takes to Facebook and begins insulting Joe Grima and running him down for his views. Regardless of whether Falzon’s accusations are justified or not (insults never are, when you have an official position of that nature), this would not be construed as Neil Falzon insulting, accusing and hurling abuse at Joe Grima – two men having a private and personal spat in public. No, it would be correctly seen to be aditus’s director laying into the Prime Minister’s special envoy to the World Trade Organisation: a verbal assault by the boss of a human rights organisation on a representative of the government of Malta.

It is part of the tragedy of public life in this country that not only do certain government and state appointees fail to understand that they do not wear separate hats, but also that the electorate colludes in the pretence of schizoid function: that one person is in reality two people, the private individual and the one that fills an official role.

Almost two years ago, Joe Grima wrote a barrage of insults against a mild-mannered British priest who had had the temerity to give his views of Mintoff in a piece published by The Catholic Herald, when Mintoff died. That priest, who is only a little older than I am, had spent several years in Malta while growing up and had boarded at St Edward’s College. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and he was remarkably civil in saying it. Joe Grima reacted by calling him a paedophile, using the F-word and running riot with vulgarity. Concerned for his image in the few months before the general election, Joseph Muscat asked him to step down as a talk-show host on the Labour Party’s television station. But a few months later, safely ensconced in power, Muscat appointed Grima as one of his right hand men as his special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation – when in that position his vulgarity and inability to understand correct behaviour can do so much more damage that it can as a mere television personality on a partisan station. And as Grima has shown ever since, not only did he not learn his lesson from the Fr Lucie-Smith debacle, but he has actually interpreted the reward the Prime Minister gave him as a licence to behave as badly as he pleases with no due regard to his official position.

We can see why Joe Grima thinks it perfectly all right to behave this way. There are others who have been at it for far longer. The Law Commissioner is not aware that he is no longer merely Franco Debono, criminal defence counsel and Member of Parliament. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has never been conscious of the fact that whenever he speaks or acts, it is as the Chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology. There are more, but my word count will not allow me to list them. The media are, I am afraid, largely to blame for this sorry state of affairs. When the Law Commissioner defends a drug dealer or rapist in the Courts of Justice, for example, the matter is reported as this being Dr Franco Debono. And when the chairman of the Malta Council of Science and Technology goes into a rabid rant on the Labour Party’s television station or Facebook (where he has now calmed down and taken to reporting on the antics of his Chihuahua), the media reports the behaviour and words as being of one Dr Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando rather than those of the chairman of a state organisation.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

 

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