Grandson of Valletta City footballer is Jeremy Corbyn’s new spokesman

A young Maltese man born and raised in Essex, Matt Zarb-Cousin, 26, has just been appointed official spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour leader. He is the grandson of the late 1950s and 1960s Valletta City footballer Albert Zarb Cousin, known as Tas-Sorry.

I now recall that Matt’s father, Mark, is exactly my age, and that he had left Malta permanently for England in the worst of the Golden Years of Labour in the early 1980s.

In 2012, when he was working as a researcher for a Labour MP at the House of Commons, Matt Zarb-Cousin hit the headlines by tweeting his congratulations to the Queen for “60 years of scrounging benefits off the taxpayer without being caught”. The news that he has been appointed Corbyn’s spokesman has renewed the flak on that.

At 16, he had become addicted to gambling machines and was driven to the point of suicide by gambling debts that rose to 25,000 pounds when he was a university student. He has given several interviews about the subject and joined the Campaign for Fairer Gambling.

Matt Zarb-Cousin