The deputy mayor of Xghajra has been sacked from the Labour Party after he refused to resign his position on the local council when he was asked to do so by the party bosses. They were then left with no choice but to do the equivalent of withdrawing the party whip, except that there isn’t a whip in local councils, so now Neil Attard sits on the council in his own name. Why did the Labour Party, which never sacks anyone except when convenient, take this exceptional measure? It’s because Attard was prosecuted for harassing and threatening his ex-girlfriend. He was conditionally discharged for three years and ordered to keep away from her. A year earlier, he was found guilty of the same offence against the same woman and sentenced to four months in prison, suspended for three years.

The Labour Party’s deputy leader, Toni Abela, told this newspaper that he had asked Neil Attard to resign from the local council, and when he refused, he was struck off the party register instead. As with parliament, political parties can’t force elected members out of their seats. All they can do is refuse to allow those elected members to carry on representing the party. Other (unnamed) sources in the Labour Party told this newspaper that Neil Attard’s behaviour “was unacceptable”. Of course it is; it is completely unacceptable and when you are a politician it is not just unacceptable but intolerable.  Yet compare and contrast the Labour Party’s reaction to the highly dispensable Neil Attard with its reaction to Cyrus Engerer, a man predisposed to ratting on others, who is suspected by his former colleagues at the Sliema Local Council of having recorded them secretly and giving the recordings to ‘Joseph”, and who thinks nothing of taking a person’s private and compromising photographs and using them for retributive purposes and possibly blackmail. Engerer wasn’t given a three-month prison sentence (suspended) but a two-and-a-half year prison sentence (suspended). That sentence was not confirmed by the Court of Appeal, but actually handed down by the Court of Appeal itself because the magistrate’s court had actually acquitted him. That shows how very seriously the Court of Appeal took the matter, and its concern is clearly spelled out in the judgement.

Yet Cyrus Engerer – Joseph Muscat’s pseudo-biographer and confidante - was not sacked from any position he held in the Labour Party. He was, however, asked to pull out of the electoral race for a seat in the European Parliament. Far from using that to distance itself from him, the Labour Party celebrated him for pulling out, and there were big public scenes in which the Prime Minister embraced Engerer closely. What we didn’t know at that stage – but should have assumed, given the nature of the two individuals involved - is that Engerer pulled out of the electoral race not for any honourable reason but for a dishonourable one. The Prime Minister had offered him something far, far better than the mere chance of a seat in the European Parliament: a well-paid ‘position of trust’ in Brussels not just for him but better still, for his boyfriend Randolph Debattista too. Between them they are now pulling in around €150,000 a year, and Engerer doesn’t even have to work for his money because he doesn’t have a specific job or job description. He gave us to understand that he was the Prime Minister’s Sherpa – perplexing, because with a criminal conviction of that nature he can’t get security clearance – and then we found out he was giant-fibbing. His boyfriend, however, is chef de cabinet to Marlene Bonnici, Malta’s permanent representative in Brussels. In other words, he is queen of Dar Malta, and I say that only because Mrs Bonnici is king.

Cyrus Engerer’s crime was far more serious than Neil Attard’s, and that is reflected in the prison sentence. But Attard is dispensable and Engerer is not. Engerer is not indispensable because of his terrific qualities, but for some other reason which causes Muscat to worry about what a loose cannon with a store of information might potentially do if he is cut off altogether. So while Engerer, with his two-and-a-half year prison sentence, lives it up with Marlene Bonnici’s chef de cabinet in Brussels on a tank of money, Attard with his three-month sentence is cut loose and spurned, and the Labour Party makes a point of telling the press that it no longer has anything to do with him.

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