That is Muscat’s blog, not Bedingfield’s

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 29 May 2016, 11:00 Last update: about 9 years ago

Glenn Bedingfield, 41, is not a journalist or anybody who makes his living in the media. All his adult life he has been an employee of the Labour Party, except for a brief period when he ran a Birgu restaurant into the ground. In March 2013, his long-time associate and contemporary at the Labour Party’s television station and its abysmal news portal, Maltastar, became Prime Minister. And Bedingfield segued comfortably from the Labour Party payroll to the state payroll, in a position of trust in the Office of the Prime Minister, in Joseph Muscat’s private secretariat, where he has been a communications aide for the last three years.

When he set up a website which he uses to harass, insult, denigrate, smear and intimidate critics of the government he serves, and other such ‘enemies of the state and the people’, you should have been left in no doubt that he did it in consultation and conspiracy with the Prime Minister himself. It would have been impossible otherwise. Aides to a prime minister – any prime minister, however lax, let alone a control freak like this one, with his 15-year plans – cannot take unilateral decisions of that nature. It would be madness, as mad as being a company employee and setting up a website to be rude about the company’s customers. You’d end up with a rocket beneath you, right out of the window, not even the door.

So take it as read that Muscat is in on this, that he was on board with Glenn Bedingfield’s website from the get-go, and that he will have suggested it himself. That is why the calls for Muscat to sack Bedingfield or to stop him are so irritating. They miss the very obvious point that Glenn Bedingfield’s website is the Prime Minister’s own project, and that is why it is so malicious. Bedingfield is colossally stupid, with the intelligence quotient of a vegetable boiled twice over in a hospital canteen. He is ignorant and uneducated. He is vulgar, crass and ill bred, with the manners of a goat. He has the extremely poor judgement of a depressive (the same depressive syndrome which has caused his ballooning weight) and the maturity of somebody 25 years his junior. But the tuquoque retorts, the bitchiness, the spite and malice, and the invasive, prurient nastiness about even private citizens who are suspected of crossing the Prime Minister are all 100% Joseph Muscat’s. Bedingfield’s website reflects, to a tee, the way Muscat thinks about people, and the way he speaks about them and to them. We have seen and heard Muscat display this spiteful bitchiness in public rather often.

My advantage here is that I have been a newspaper writer since 1990, which means that I have observed these two – Joseph Muscat and Glenn Bedingfield – since they first came on the Labour Party scene in the early 1990s, when they were 18. Back then, we all went to press conferences and the same media events. It was a very different scene, much smaller, and you ran into each other all the time. They were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Super One and Maltastar, a weird couple of sorts, two plump and dumpy unattractive young men, one a rabidly ambitious sociopath with a plan who wrote books of scandal for SensielaKotbaSocjalisti while courting, strategically, the Labour Party leader’s personal assistant (he married her), and the other a depressive loser with little to no energy, who is still tucked under his mate’s wing so many years down the line.

Bedingfieldcriticised a judge the other day. He was ill-advised to do it, because the judge in question is a respectable woman with no black marks anywhere in her private, professional or public life. His idiotic remarks went down very badly, and provoked an angry statement by the Chamber of Advocates and another one by the Opposition leader. Bedingfield and his internet trolls tried to make out that the Chamber has employed two weights and two measures, because when I criticised a magistrate on my website, the Chamber did not “condemn” me. I don’t think Bedingfield is being disingenuous there, though even he can’t have failed to miss the inherent silliness in the suggestion that Chamber president George Hyzler, of all people, would bend over backwards to be nice about me, given the fact that we have stonewalled each other for two decades with no plans whatsoever to change that situation.

I think Bedingfield is actually too intellectually challenged to understand the issues. If he were bright enough to understand them, he wouldn’t be scrabbling around still on Muscat’s charity in his 40s. First, I did not criticise the magistrate’s judgement in court but her very appointment by this government, because of her questionable connections with the underworld and with the Justice Minister before he became Justice Minister, and the fact that she moved straight from the Labour Party ticket to the bench in the space of some weeks. Secondly, but no less significantly, I am a journalist, which means that drawing public attention to these matters is actually my duty and my job. But Glenn Bedingfield is an aide to the Prime Minister, so anything he says is taken to come from the Prime Minister’s Office, with the authority and blessing of the Prime Minister himself.

And that is the crux of the matter. The fact that Bedingfield is on the state payroll, though it is mentioned all the time by people who have trouble sorting the wood from the trees, is completely irrelevant except for the fact that he is working on his website during office hours. But that would be a problem of misuse of working hours even if his website were about cooking, or DIY. The fact that it is a way of menacing the government’s critics is, again, irrelevant in that respect. If Bedingfield were a watchman in a government department, he would still be paid by the state, but even if he wrote insults on a website it wouldn’t have significance and it wouldn’t be an issue. They would be just a watchman’s insults.

Bedingfield’s website has significance, and is a malign instrument, only because he is an aide to the Prime Minister. It would be that way even if he were aiding the Prime Minister on a voluntary basis, without remuneration, and producing his dross in the evenings, at home. What we have here is a situation in which one of the Prime Minister’s closest aides, so close that he is a personal friend with whom he travels to watch football and queues at Burger King in Rome for snacks at 1am, is using the internet to menace, threaten, intimidate, attempt to frighten and cow, insult, smear and denigrate people who pose any kind of threat to Joseph Muscat and his inner circle.

The Prime Minister, when challenged by the press about his aide’s damnable behaviour, merely responded that his remark about the judge was “uncalled for”. He then justified his aide’s internet harassment of government critics by saying that he “respects (Bedingfield’s) freedom of expression”. Muscat’s cynicism knows no bounds. Bedingfield’s activities on the internet are not about his own freedom of expression, but a concerted attempt at curtailing, through systematic harassment, the freedom of expression of people who pose challenges and threats to the government.

It is the right and duty of journalists and electors to scrutinise, criticise and expose the government. It is not the right and duty of the government to scrutinise, criticise and expose journalists and electors. The scrutiny of the government by journalists and critics is called democracy. The scrutiny of journalists and critics by the government is called fascism. In its failure to understand this fundamental distinction lies the Labour Party’s eternally besetting democratic deficit.