The Prime Minister’s aide, Glenn Bedingfield aka Fat Gland, has chosen to mark Eastertide by launching an assault on the Archbishop. I imagine he believes this is a jolly good way of rallying the Labour Party’s grass-roots Mintoffian support in the wake of the near-total collapse of Labour’s switcher-vote. And of course, by doing that he rallies them and puts off almost everybody else. Even those who are not religious are not at all tantalised by volleys of insults levied at harmless religious leaders like the diminutive archbishop. The Labour Party doesn’t think him harmless because he packs a powerful personality for somebody so small, and those trolls over at Labour HQ like powerful personalities only when they praise Joseph and his freeloading consort Michelle.

The Prime Minister’s aide is also using what he no doubt calls his “blokk” to launch systematic assaults on any other critic of the government he represents and the Prime Minister for whom he works. This includes journalists, and right now, the pet target of the Prime Minister’s aide and his ‘blokk’ is – it goes without saying – me. The vulgarity and crassness are unbelievable, or rather they would be if this were not the Super One Party and Super One Government we were talking about. Had I voted for these people and helped put them into power, I would at this stage be so painfully embarrassed that I would find it difficult to struggle out from beneath the duvet in the morning. Joseph and his brigands have been exposed for what they are. Or rather, they have been partially exposed and the consequences for them have been disastrous. If and when they are fully exposed they will be hounded out of town, figuratively speaking, by a baying crowd lobbying rotten tomatoes at them, and those who boasted so heartily about having ‘voted for Joseph and his movement’ will have to hide from a lynch mob.

The contempt which the Prime Minister and his wife show for the electorate and public opinion must leave proper politicians totally gobsmacked. In the thick swirl of the worst corruption scandal to hit Maltese politics since 1987, those two jet off for their Easter holidays, with their children, to a secret, undisclosed location.

I then discover, thanks to an efficiently functioning network, that the secret location is one of the most expensive hotels in Dubai, the Hotel Atlantis the Palm, where an Easter holiday special for families costs many thousands of euros, as many people in Malta earn in a year. The Prime Minister, who is famous for scrounging every last cent he can and rarely spending any of his own money unless he can help it, is unlikely to be picking up the tab. The suspicion therefore lurks that somebody in Dubai is doing so, and that favours paid will have to be repaid. But even in the unlikely event that the Prime Minister were to pick up his own tab, this remains demonstrably an insult to the electorate. A Prime Minister caught up in the thick of scandal, with the other two members of his triad caught with secret companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, has to be truly impervious and indifferent to public opinion if he disappears for a few days to drop several thousand euros in some chavtastic palace in Dubai.

People were so impressed by what was thought to be Joseph Muscat’s fabulously skilled marketing before the general election. Had his skills really been that good, he would be using them now, and he is not. So whatever was going on before the general election, skilled marketing was not among them. Networking for votes among people who were already seriously fed-up of the Nationalists in government, who were bored and looking for a good Labour Party to vote for, something they desperately wanted to believe in, fine – but when it comes down to brass tacks, Muscat and his band are unable or unwilling to manage public opinion while in office. It is as though they are deliberately going out of their way to make people as angry as possible, to defy public opinion as brazenly as they can, to upset as many people as badly as they can without actually being lynched.

Of course, they had never actually planned for the eruption of Panamagate and had no plan on how to deal with it. But at the barest minimum, jetting off to Dubai to splash about other people’s money should not have been part of the contingency operation. Then again, they hadn’t counted on being found out for that either.

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