This is how they informed the press, who are expected to cover the ‘meet and greet’ part of the evening: ‘Change in time’.

How did they inform the guests – by ringing them up and telling them, “Please come later because the host can’t make it at the time he gave you”?

In any case, what can possibly have happened here? Did the PM discover a more fascinating subsequent engagement of the Don Draper variety (most unlikely), or does Mrs Muscat need more time to get her hair wrapped up in one of those up-dos tat-tigijiet ta’ nies ta’ certu tip after getting the children organised with the baby-sitter?

I despair.

From: Press Releases at OPM [mailto:press.releases@gov.mt]
Sent: 20 May 2013 13:57
Subject: DOI – Press Cov Change in Time

Monday 20th May 2013

Villa Francia, Lija.

Muscat calls on Busuttil at PN headquarters – leaders call for less aggressive political media
Parties to hold meetings every two months

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Opposition leader Simon Busuttil have agreed that their two parties should hold open-agenda meetings every two months.

Dr Busuttil said he was ready to contribute to making politics a positive experience, adding he was willing to see the party media “calm down”.

(…)

I am so unimpressed. The Labour Party’s viciously malevolent – not merely aggressive – media are its single most valuable weapon in the battle to gain and maintain power, given that neither policy nor ability are on its side.

Over the years, it has concentrated more of its money and efforts in developing its media weapons of warfare and using them for a full-scale ceaseless assault that ran like a constant electoral campaign between one election and another, than in developing policy and politicians.

Also, the sort of people who are magnetically attracted to Labour are the kind who love that brand of malevolence and who are vulnerable to its negative seduction.

Just look at the last five years of conversations you have had and those you have overheard to see evidence of this: endless numbers of people, even supposedly intelligence ones, repeating Super One lies and propaganda, sometimes even at at several removes and without having any idea that they are parroting Super One.

With the rampant aggression of Super One, the Labour Party would not have been able to build that ‘zieda ta’ hames mitt euro’, scrapped in 2009 and all the money refunded, into a major electoral issue four years later.

That is just one example of hundreds.

There is no way the Labour Party is going to give up this weapon or make it any less aggressive. Instead it will carry on becoming more and more aggressive even as its consummate paranoia increases, oblivious to the fact that attacking individuals viciously when you are the party in Opposition is one thing (though bad enough already), but attacking them relentlessly when you are the party in government is a violation of democratic norms associated with totalitarian regimes.

But still they will do it, and get worse, because they are demonstrably paranoid.

As for the PN-owned media, they have never been aggressive. Their main problem has long been far too much timidity and mealy-mouthed tiptoeing around issues precisely because of this very fear of being the party in government that is ‘attacking’ individuals. So instead they went to the other extreme, with even actual news reportage suffering the effects of too much niceness.

And look what happened. The Vile Machine won the battle against the Nice Machine.

There were other reasons, but believe me (as somebody who’s been out here scrutinising the whole thing for my sins), that’s the main one.

Everywhere I went, I would hear the most surprising people parroting Super One, and Malta Today, and they would even say things like, “But it’s true; I heard it on television/read it in the newspaper” without making any distinction between which television or what newspaper.

Incidentally, I disagree with those who say that Simon Busuttil is too soft and that he is being too nice to Muscat – there are comments to this effect in respect of this visit and Muscat’s reception there.

I think Busuttil is more likely to be fixing on lulling Muscat into accepting an invitation to dinner, so to speak, and then doing a Borgia on him. I speak, of course, metaphorically. I also think that Muscat is well aware of this, and knows through experience that he is now dealing with a very different character and personality type.

Muscat’s joke tal-hamalli (there’s no other word for it, it was such poor taste and such appalling manners) to Busuttil about Lawrence Gonzi being the predecessor they have in common (“taghna lkoll”) may have been met with a smile for the cameras, but that smile was edged with frost – a civilised response to highly uncivilised behaviour.

It’s the frost beneath the smile that you have to look at, and not the smile on the surface. Muscat knows that, and it unnerves him already. Prepare yourself for more awkward jokes by Muscat in the face of Busuttil’s composure and inscrutable facial expression. These will be interesting times, in the Chinese meaning.

Back in July, the woman caught spying for Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party and sacked by her employers RTK (the Catholic radio station), in the case of the ‘flirtatious’ emails, lamented on Facebook:

Sabrina Agius
It’s not what you know and how much you know…it’s who you know…
19 July at 14:08

Ethelbert Schembri
Very sad but true !
19 July at 14:19

Sabrina Agius
Unfortunately it’s a REALITY…however at times you just don’t expect it reigns within certain insittutions

Fast forward to May 2013, and Sabrina Agius has a job in the secretariat for hunting and trapping, as spokeswoman for Parliamentary Secretary Roderick Galdes.

Careful there, Roderick – she might be a double-agent, working for the finches.

Malta’s prime minister. Believe it. True, we haven’t seen him for some time, but maybe he’s busy lining up the Thermos flasks.

When people feel they are under siege, they begin to concentrate on their paranoia and can’t operate normally. This government has behaved with paranoia from day one, when it executed all the permanent secretaries and put the head of the civil service to the firing squad, then demanded the resignations of all chairmen, CEOs and directors of state corporations and even public authorities.

Since then it has adopted one of two approaches to those it considers its enemies.

1. The neutering approach, which is to appear to be offering the hand of friendship to those it considers most vulnerable to such approaches, as a prelude to wiping them out. This is the equivalent of inviting your enemy to dinner and then poisoning him once he is seated at your table thinking ‘Wow, this is great.’ It is a tactic as old as history, with different methods of elimination used as appropriate.

2. The menacing approach, coupled with harassment – this is the method which will be used with those real and perceived enemies of the Labour Party who refuse to accept invitations to the table (ma jridux jahdmu maghna) because they know that supping with the devil requires a long spoon or, at the very least, a personal food-taster. Ostensibly legal means will be used to harass and menace individuals, who are left with no means to defend them and powerless to seek redress. It was a system Labour of the 1970s and 1980s used to greatly deleterious effect, even creating laws, systems and regulations that allowed them to harass and target individuals with the law on their side, even though the spirit of those laws breached every democratic value and in many instances, also human rights.

These lines from L-Orizzont’s (the newspaper that claims Ronnie Pellegrini is one of its reporters) leading article today sum up the paranoia and siege mentality, when Labour has been in government for a mere, piddling two months. They speak about the dangers of leaving ‘enemies of the state’ – I use that term with all its Soviet implications – in positions of trust.

wisq probabbli qed juzaw il-karigi li thallew f’idejhom u l-poteri li ghandhom biex jissoktaw bil-komplotti, il-pjani fini u l-istrategiji fis-satra halli hekk kif tfegg xi opportunita favorevoli ghalihom u/jew ghall-PN, jergghu johorgu fil-berah l-armi l-kbar

With this level of suspicion and paranoia expressed openly by the Labour media, no wonder the Cabinet is removing everyone across the board, forbidding mobile phones at meetings, and so on.

And no wonder, too, that Joseph Muscat has holed himself up in his ivory tower and is rarely seen in public. Any moment now and he will start doing what his hero Dom Mintoff used to do, and cooking his own food in hotel rooms, only accepting invitations to official functions (or other public dining) if the food is shared by all at a buffet, and carrying a Thermos flask around with him with his own hot drinks, made by himself, even at the Auberge de Castille.

Oh, didn’t you know that this is what Mintoff did, because he was so scared of being poisoned? Well, now you do.

In Egypt, two journalists who critcised President Morsi are to stand trial for criminal defamation. The case has made the world news after being reported by Reuters and other news agencies this morning.

This is because true democracies understand the implications of having politicians use the police/criminal defamation trials against journalists who criticise them.

If a politician truly feels aggrieved and thinks something is libellous, he shouldn’t resort to the police, but file a civil suit. The implications of using the police go way beyond the attainment of justice.

I just cannot understand why so many people fail to grasp this in Malta, even as they po-facedly note the fact that whenever there are criminal defamation suits instigated by politicians against journalists, in places with oppressive regimes where democracy and freedom of speech are under threat, the news agencies report them and they make the international headlines.

Are any statistics kept in Malta on the numbers of cases involving politicians using the police to go after journalists?

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

And again:

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

Once more:

tista’ ma taqbilx magħna, iżda tista’ taħdem magħna

Now spot the flaw in that reasoning – or rather, the threat implicit in that statement, which you probably missed in the euphoria of the election campaign, and in the immediate electoral aftermath.

Maltese makes no distinction between ‘can’ and ‘may’, which makes this statement even more ambiguously sinister.

You can/may disagree with us, but you can/may work with us.

The threat implicit in that statement is this: we have said we will work with you, therefore if you refuse to work with us you have declared war on us and that leaves us free to declare war on you.

The statement itself is morally wrong because it does not take cognizance of the fact that nobody in his right mind (and certainly nobody principled) wants to work with people with whom he fundamentally disagrees, doing things he fundamentally disagrees with.

It is nothing short of an invitation to acts of amoral pragmatism, the sort of behaviour Muscat and those who surround him take for granted as normal, purely for the sake of survival.

The message embedded in that statement will be new to younger people. It is not new to others, who can already feel the beginnings of the return of the atmosphere of malevolence, fear and negativity that permeated the 1970s and 1980s, when people routinely lived their lives with a knot of tension in their stomach, wondering when the next thing would come out of left field to harrow their days, leaving them powerless to defend themselves.

There a disturbance in Valletta’s St Paul Street this morning when a car parked on the pavement jammed up all incoming traffic. The police arrived, and Transport Malta personnel lifted the car further to the side so that the traffic could get through.

Displayed on the windscreen is a police permit issued to journalists, allowing them to “park in restricted areas in exceptional emergency cases when on official journalistic duties only” (incidentally, I don’t have one of those).

The individual is listed on the permit as one Ronnie Pellegrini, a journalist employed with Union Print Co Ltd. Union Print is the General Workers Union’s publishing arm, publishers of It-Torca and L-Orizzont.

Ronnie Pellegrini is employed with the General Workers Union as an official of some sort, but he is definitely not a journalist and he does not work for L-Orizzont and It-Torca.

He is a very close friend of Valletta 2018 chairman Jason Micallef and he spends rather a lot of time hanging about with the Super One crowd and the young people at Forum Zghazagh Laburisti despite being in his late 50s. Maybe he sees himself as a sort of political mentor.

In the Golden Eighties, he was Lorry Sant’s chief sidekick, fixer and henchman, and stuck by him even after the 1987 change in government.

I’d say he knows exactly what was in that brown envelope with which Lorry Sant tried to blackmail the Mintoffs around 1992.

What nice people we’ve got calling the shots now – my, my, my.

I imagine that Toni Abela, Labour’s deputy leader, wasn’t the only one who found a pulizija Laburist. Ronnie Pellegrini must have found one too, to get that strict-issue permit when he doesn’t qualify for it.

Oh, and did you notice? It expired last January and he hasn’t bothered to renew, presumably because he can now park on the pavement wherever he likes, even when not reporting on a major crime scene for L-Orizzont.

In any case, that isn’t Ronnie Pellegrini’s car. He drives a smart, new BMW.

The Times today carries a story about a man who laments the fact that, 29 years after his elderly mother was knocked down on a zebra crossing in front of several witnesses on a June evening in Hamrun, dragged for a kilometre by the hit-and-run driver, and left for dead, he still does not know who did it because the police never found the person involved.

Oh, I’ll bet they did. Many people saw the car.

This was 1984. What probably did happen is that they found the driver (or, at least, the owner of the car) and thought it best to let ‘investigations’ stop right there.

That’s the way things happened back then, in Karmenu Vella’s legendary Golden Years.

That same year, I went to the Valletta police station to file a report against the driver of car X, number plate Y, who was parked in the middle of the road on Merchant Street, outside the Foreign Ministry, leaning out of the window and bantering with Alex Sceberras Trigona’s (he was then foreign minister) thugs, indifferent to the other drivers waiting behind him.

Those drivers included me, right behind him. When I put my hand on the horn and asked him to get a move on, he put his car into reverse and rammed mine, smashing the front, then sped off.

When I went to the police with my report, the sergeant at the desk was all alacrity until he looked up the number-plate. Then he blanched. “Look,” he said, “for your own safety and ours I’m not even going to write down your report, because we won’t be able to proceed on it anyway, and you’ll end up with a bomb on your doorstep. That was X, a notorious criminal. Just drop it. Even if you want to proceed, we won’t allow you.”

I’d say much the same thing happened with that poor woman’s death, except that because there was such a horrible death involved, the victim’s son wasn’t given the name of the perpetrator, as I was for something much less serious and because that particular sergeant was concerned for my safety besides his own.

I dropped it – it was only a car bumper, and I was 19. But you don’t drop it when what’s involved is the horrid death of your parent. Had that woman’s children been given the name of the driver, they would have insisted on pursuing the case. I’d say the police had the name, but kept it under wraps and hoped the problem would go away, which it did – for them, but not for her children.

The Malta Independent reports:

Mr Micallef, on his part, said that the foundation’s aim was to involve the public in a holistic manner, in a programme reflecting the values of the European Capital for Culture initiative, and that Valletta residents themselves would be at the centre of this.

He said that the city was blessed with talent and enthusiasm, including through its football club, feast and carnival enthusiasts and many more, and said that this should be central to the process.

Jason, missing the point, as usual. He thinks Valletta 2018 is a project for and by people who live in Valletta. It’s bad enough that he was clueless to start with, but why hasn’t anyone briefed him?

In Malta Today:

On his part, V18 chairman Jason Micallef said: “Today we all have a smile on our faces – Valletta is no longer a candidate city as Capital for Culture.”

“Creativity is important. But so is ‘simplicity’. We’re going to listen to all the citizens of Valletta – even those from vulnerable, or less priviledged backgrounds.”