Labour goes international with its crass, small-minded stupidity
I think we have some problems with our DNA, Charles.
Below, you’ll find the latest post on Charles Crawford’s blog. Charles Crawford is a former British ambassador who now works as a consultant. He noticed this blog, wrote about it on his own, and was thereafter assaulted by the elves in My Dear Joseph’s grotto, with their misspelled, misconstrued, ungrammatical and incoherent CoMiNTs!!!!????!!!
The poor man clearly doesn’t know what hit him, but he does know now that Lilliput is peopled by inbred maniacs who haven’t been schooled beyond the age of eight, and who are incapable of framing what they consider to be major issues within their proper context.
They can’t understand that people who aren’t Maltese don’t know and don’t care whether DaFNi CarUAna GALiziA!!!!! is a PN ekTIviST or not, whether CONSueLo HerRera????!!! has virtue or not, and whether WAKE UP AND SMALL DI COFFIE GONZIPN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is a good prime minister or not.
They care only about the phenomenon of a Maltese blog that gets 100,000 to 140,000 views a day and which deals with talking-points that other media don’t talk about.
That’s what Charles Crawford’s original point was: that a new form of democracy is developing right beneath our noses.
Today, he woke up to find that he had been drawn, as he himself put it (and as I so often describe the situation myself) into a parallel universe.
He was on the front page of KullHadd, the Labour Party’s newspaper, described as the Maltese government’s new spin doctor, close to the prime minister, and the proof of this is that he ‘is praising Daphne’s blog and Daphne is close to the prime minister’s inner circles’ (I’m not, not at all – ask them).
The same story also ran on Maltastar.com, in its usual hysterical idiom. Crawford can’t read KullHadd and he appears not to know that Maltastar.com and KullHadd are the official media organs of the Labour Party.
He might be a bit taken aback to discover that, because Maltastar is largely incoherent and you wouldn’t ordinarily expect that level of amateurishness from a government-in-waiting. But then incoherency, stupidity and amateurishness are part of the Labour brand, so it fits.
Throughout the day, Crawford received messages from Glenn Bedingfield (he calls him Glenn Dangerfield) of One News (if you’re reading this, Mr Crawford, One News, too, is owned by the Labour Party – One is the party’s television station).
Anyway, you’d best pick up the story from his own blog-post, which I have reproduced here.
See also my earlier post about the subject, written this morning.
CHARLES CRAWFORD
HELP! I’VE ENTERED A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
14th March 2010
Driving down the M40 to visit my elderly mother today for Mother’s Day, there was a sudden whooshing sound and dazzling lights as my car was swept into hyperspace (a bit like that extended cosmic Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
Or maybe it was a traffic jam, and I started day-dreaming.
Whatever.
Arriving in HemeI Hempstead I found myself in the strange Parallel Universe of Maltastar.
Here is its banner heading as flickering across my screen right now, at 19.21 UK time this evening:
Highlights: Crawford refuses to answer Maltastar questions
What?
What?!?
I have had no request from Maltastar to answer questions. What I have had amidst dozens of hard-to-follow comments from Malta posted on my blog is an email from one Glenn Dangerfield. It was sent at 12.36 to the contact link on my site, thus:
Dear Mr Crawford
With reference to media reports and to your blog on your homepage we would like to call you to get your reaction on tonight’s edition of One News.
Where can we contact you please?
Regards,
Glenn Bedingfield
Political Editor
One News
There was no telephone number, no explanation of what One News is, nor even any indication that One News is in fact in Malta.
Being at my mother’s house with no computer and having no way to check what if anything this might be about, plus not wanting to get dragged into a fatuous non-story in Malta if indeed that was the subject, I quickly and politely replied from my iPhone:
Dear Glenn
I am running around a lot with Mother’s Day activities, so I’ll let my website say all I have to say on this topic.
Many thanks,
Charles
Sent from my iPhone
This message appears to have been passed by Mr Bedingfield to Maltastar and then genetically modified into this:
When contacted by Maltastar.com, the Prime Minister’s consultant Charles Crawford refused to answer any questions, stating that all he needed to say was said in his personal blog.
On the said blog, Crawford says that he does not know many Maltese persons and also mentions Daphne Caruana Galizia, a columnits who is very close to the Prime Minister’s inner circle. He praises her blogs.
In that same blog entry, Crawford states “Maltese politics and personalities are a subject about which I know nothing.” However he fails to mention the fact that he has been contracted by the Maltese Government to give his expert advice. In his blog Mr Crawford never denies he had a meeting with Prime Minister Gonzi.
Good grief.
For the record:
* I am NOT the Malta Prime Minister’s consultant
* I have NOT been contacted by Maltastar.
* I was contacted by ONE News, part of ONE Productions, whose website does not say that it is an organ of Maltastar (although maybe it is?)
* I am bewildered by the Maltastar claim that I have not mentioned on my site that I have been “contracted by the Maltese Government to give my expert advice”. This makes it 100% clear that I was asked by the Malta Foreign Ministry to give professional diplomatic communications training, and indeed have done so
*As for the Maltastar claim that In his blog Mr Crawford never denies he had a meeting with Prime Minister Gonzi, I plead guilty. Why? Because the subject has not arisen! No-one has ever asked me whether I have had a meeting with Prime Minister Gonzi.
This absurd suggestion seems to be having a life of its own. I have just received another comment on my site from a Mr bUTTIGIEG(sic) asking whether I met the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister during my stay.
Maltastar, ONE News, Mr bUTTIGIEG and anyone else in, from or pertaining to Malta who has not died of boredom by this stage! Please read what follows very carefully:
No. And No.
No, I did not meet the Prime Minister.
No, I did not meet the Foreign Minister.
What I did do was give 1.5 days’ professional diplomatic communications training (official drafting, writing, speechwriting and so on) to a small group of government officials, as agreed with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In a supreme moment of Maltese irony, I emphasised the value of Accuracy in all professional work.
I gave lots of real-life examples of long sentences (bad), short sentences (good), solecisms, infelicities and so on with a view to helping the course participants write brisk English for all official communications purposes.
Oh, and to break the monotony we watched a YouTube clip from Mars Attacks, as it is a witty example of official prose-style when applied to oratory:
Then I walked up to look at the superlative St John’s Cathedral. I had a lugubrious slice of pizza at the airport. I flew home on Air Malta, which showed itself to be punctual and efficient.
That’s it, folks.
Nothing whatsoever to do with parachuting unhappy MPs into government Ministries as per the original Maltastar allegation.
Nothing whatsoever to do with mediating disputes between any political party or faction.
No political consultancy.
Just the sort of normal (but rather well done) Good Writing and other training I have been giving to other governments and the European Commission, to help officials and thereby Ministers get messages across to each other and the public, accurately and clearly and (sometimes) memorably.
I am loath to say anything else on this subject.
And if people in Malta henceforth want to fight their vivid political battles actually in Malta itself, and not in the Comments section of my website, that will be fine too.
All that said, if anyone in Malta wants cool professional top-end communications or mediation training, here I am.
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http://www.maltastar.com/pages/r1/ms10dart.asp?a=7687
Oh my sainted trousers. Not this.
Since I posted my comment earlier on, they corrected it a bit but they missed out on correcting the ‘weather’. It is still raining tonight.
I cannot believe his assertion that these students are penalised even when they sit for a Maltese exam, but can anyone explain to me how it is possible to:
1. deliver lectures and set examinations in Maltese;
2. refuse all non-Maltese applicants on the grounds that lectures and examinations are in Maltese?
I think that Muscat has discovered that there is a Facebook account on this topic with around 1800 members (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=343167123754) and he sees them as potential votes.
[Daphne – More half-assed thinking, as per usual. If those people are in a Facebook Group calling for examinations to be set in Maltese, then he should have worked out that they vote Labour already. So he has nothing to gain by championing their cause, while he stands to scare off rational people in droves (not difficult, for Labour) as Sant did with his repeater class.]
This is no surprise at all. Muscat’s sort inhabit a world where everybody studies law, plus some wishy-washy stuff like public policy and so on. Try setting a mathematics or physics or anatomy or whatever exam paper in Maltese. What’s next? The department of French setting exam papers in Maltese?
Those geniuses at The Times (who inhabit Muscat’s world) have added their contribution to this national idiocy in today’s edition. Something about “It’s a shame that Maltese has been banned bla bla bla….”.
Isn’t Glenn Bedingfield the editor of Maltastar?
And isn’t KullHadd edited by Toni Abela, the deputy leader of the Labour Party?
Qed jaqtaw figura sabiha, ukoll
Mr. Crawford, welcome to the Asterix & Obelix village style reporting of the Labour Party media in Malta.
Can you imagine these people in government? How embarrassing. They never get one right. But it shows you how desperate they are. The harder they try, the more gaffes they make.
[Daphne – I think it has more to do with stupidity and general ignorance than desperation. They’re ta’ wara l-muntanji, and boy, does it show. The sad thing is that they’re not aware of it.]
They remind me of the Gauls from Asterix’s village.
Only snag (for them) is that they don’t have the magic potion.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f0/Asterix_-_Cast.png/600px-Asterix_-_Cast.png
Or a sense of humour.
The elves have been commenting on any article that involves Malta and the government, on the BBC, CNN and Sky. Always the same writing but with different names, most of which are fake. I think that at Super 1 they have a section of people whose job it is to comment on internet sites using different names.
They must be the same people who tend to invade The Times’ commentsboards when it comes to “hot” issues (or, for that matter, non-issues).
Those are the elves. They live in a grotto called Super One.
Madonna, this is seriously embarrassing.
Indhil barrani – just hilarious.
Crawford now knows the reason why we have 95% turn-out in general elections, and why people are so involved in politics.
50% of the Maltese population are nut-jobs who seem to live in a world of their own.
So every general election all the normal people are forced to go out and vote for one party, to keep King Carnival and The Morons out of power.
That is the sad truth about Malta.
King Carnival and The Morons, with a deputy leader who sued for libel because he thought someone called him a c*nt.
Oh my God! I’ve just read Charles Crawford’s blog – how frigging embarrassing. They just couldn’t get the hint that he wasn’t interested in petty local political battles. They went on and on and on.
But on a lighter note, I love the way Brits living abroad think that they become anthropologists cum psychologists overnight. “We’re taught to be leaders”… erm, yeah, ok!
From Mr. Crawford’s post above: “All that said, if anyone in Malta wants cool professional top-end communications or mediation training, here I am”
Just the solution the Labour Party needs: some cool professional top-end communications training.
He can start at the top. They’re a PR disaster.
Glenn Bedingfield must be pleased that he’s hit the big-time.
Take a look at his website, http://www.glennbedingfield.com. I didn’t know he spoke Japanese.
You can translate it using Google Translate. Here’s what part of it says:
“If other body s of Internet shopping deals there are a few items to choose from is definitely not to say that …”
Evidently Glen writes Chinese as fluently and flawlessly as he writes English …
It’s Japanese.
Remember that only last week Labour tried to give the impression that Dr Joseph Muscat had a meeting with the top brass in France.
No wonder Labour are now mixing up Charles Crawford’s meeting with ‘a small group of government officials’ with a meeting with the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister.
Will Maltastar and One news have the decency to publish Mr. Crawford’s unequivocal denial above?
They don’t believe in the right to reply.
This is not stupidity but just what they are paid to do – that is, spin whatever story seems remotely spinnable. If you are a journalist working for a political party and know that whatever you say no matter if it’s right or wrong gives you the same result (~40% agree, ~40% disagree and ~20% don’t give a f**k) it kind of kills your motivation. I hope you buy this one.
[Daphne – I don’t. Unprofessional communication communicates something far beyond the actual story: an unprofessional party. People pick up that message. Take somebody like me, for example. I look at Maltastar and I think to myself ‘WTF? I can’t vote for a party like that. If they can’t write, spell, construct a story or use their brain, then they definitely can’t run the country.’ I’m not the only one who thinks like that.]
Me too.
If whatever you do gives you the same result, why not put your money to better use?
Hell, I forget…this is the PL we’re talking about.
Charles Crawford must think all this is absolutely hilarious. The fact that these nincompoops will be senior cabinet ministers in three years’ time is no concern of his.
The Labour Party when in office did run the country, a nose-dive straight to the ground.
As always, they are an embarrassment to us all but, mostly to themselves.
I am now in a quandary as to the result of the 2013 general election.
Good Lord,
How embarrassing!
Ha ikomply iwaqqawghna ghan-nejk!
So it was your basic kind of feller Charles J Buttigieg who contacted Crowford (sic).
X’partit tac-cwiec.
Charles J bUTTIGIEG · 14 hours ago
Did you meet with our PM ,his PA and the Min.of Foreign affairs during your stay in Malta? An insider at the OPM told me that you did.
charlescrawford 13 hours ago
Dear Mr bUTTIGIEG,
I say only this: http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/help-i-ve-entered…
X’MISTHIJA!
You mean, x’MIstHIJA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Had this happened pre-1987, he would have probably been arrested for breaching the Soviet-style Foreign Interference Act…how very progressive.