The day before yesterday I published on my website Muscat’s Visa credit card receipt for his check-out bill at the Hotel Atlantis the Palm in Dubai, over Easter last year. The total, as the whole of Malta now knows, was €11,014. At the time I’m writing this, which is yesterday evening, that post had been shared 7,500 times on Facebook alone and the admin statistics show me that it was read 37,000 times by that point. So nobody can deny it was a story.

This did not stop the trolls swarming all over the internet to sow doubt. The message HQ told them to repeat was clearly: “How do you know it is the Prime Minister’s receipt, when there isn’t his name on it?” Because of course, in the world they inhabit, Visa chits come with your name up top. This was so obviously the official line that even Glenn Bedingfield, the Prime Minister’s communications aide and close personal friend who travels with him on family holidays (but not to Dubai) repeated it on his awful ‘blokk’. So Bedingfield was either deliberately lying to his readers and spinning them a line, or the Prime Minister and Kurt Farrugia had left him out of the loop and failed to tell him the truth: that yes, it really is Muscat’s Visa card receipt.

The evening I broke the story, Mario Frendo from the Nationalist Party’s television station stood outside parliament doing what he excels at: harassing Labour MPs with that Woody Allen factor of his which leaves them completely unable to retaliate viciously or aggressively lest they be perceived as bullying somebody with Allen’s persona. Most of them refused to reply, except for Godfrey Farrugia, who always stops to give a coherent and polite response, which is commendable. The others rushed past with their faces turned away, but for Christian Cardona, the honourable Minister for Precautionary Warrants, who stopped to sneer sarcastically, “Who was it who revealed the story? That one who reveals things that are not true.” How I laughed. Either the Prime Minister and Kurt Farrugia have failed to brief him, I said to myself, or he knows the truth but thinks he should keep up a front by brazenly lying again. We will never know which it is, because Cardona is not going to admit to either.

Then yesterday evening, more than 24 hours after I broke the story and published his Visa chit, the Prime Minister thought it best to issue a statement admitting that yes, that really is his receipt. Suddenly, Labour’s internet trolls were flapping around like headless chickens. So it was true, after all, and the “poisonous blogger” was not “spreading hate” but reporting the facts, complete with the actual receipt so that there is no room for misinterpretation. The Great Leader really had spent €11,014 on his hotel bill alone for six nights. So how much had he spent on the whole trip, with return flights for four people, taxis, excursions, shopping and so on? To say nothing of Mrs Muscat’s henna tattoo, of course – though I’m told those can be had, like certain people who I shan’t mention, for very little.

So then a fresh debate began, with a new spiel: the Prime Minister earns €68,000 a year, so he can afford to spend €15,000 or thereabouts on a six-day Easter holiday. What sort of reasoning is that? For a start, €68,000 is his gross salary. After the state takes its dues, he’s left with around €55,000. From that, he’s immediately got to set aside €7,000 for the San Anton School fees for his daughters. Another close to €1,000 will have to be set aside for books, uniforms, extra-curricular activities, stationary and all the attendant expenses that come over and above the tuition fees.

That leaves him with €47,000 from which he’s got to pay for food, water and electricity, his wife’s extensive and ever-changing costume collection, household maintenance, and all the other things normal householders have to pay for. His wife has no income of her own, because she doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for years. They don’t pay for their cars (he gets paid for his) or petrol, or for their telecoms expenses – all well and good – but Easter in Dubai was not the only holiday they took. They are seen buzzing off here and there several times a year, and beyond that, Mrs Muscat and the children frequently fly out to meet the Prime Minister when he is on official trips. If they are not having those trips abusively paid out of the public purse, then it follows they are paying for them themselves. If so, how?

“Maybe he saved up”, several people said on the internet. Can they be more ridiculous? The Prime Minister is not an ordinary person desperate for a week’s trip abroad after 48 weeks chained to his desk and three weeks mooching around at home “on leave”. Why on earth would the Prime Minister “save up” to blow €15,000 on six days in Dubai when he and his wife jet-set about all the time? When people throw money away like that, it’s because it’s easy come, easy go. That’s the way I read it.

At least we now know why he brushed off the Opposition’s challenge in parliament, last year, to publish his hotel bill and prove that he paid for his own holiday. It wasn’t because somebody else had paid for it. It was because he was too embarrassed to reveal to Malta’s pensioners that he had spent more on six days in Dubai than they have money to live on in a whole year. He knows that, given his position, it’s in the worst possible taste to do something like that, because it’s insulting to those he governs.

 

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