Saviour Balzan's fantasy: Jeffrey as Russell Crowe in a leather kilt

No, it's not Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando - though Saviour Balzan thinks it is

Last Sunday, sad Saviour Balzan took time between bouts of temper tantrums (his, not the baby’s) to embarrass himself with a near-homoerotic paean of praise to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando.

This was not for pulling off the divorce referendum (and well done for that), but for that business in the 2008 election campaign when Pullicino Orlando confronted Alfred Sant during a press conference at the TVM studios and Sant turned chicken and fled.

That’s right, the very same incident which had Malta Today clambering over itself with excitement calling for Pullicino Orlando’s resignation and hounding the Nationalist Party to see what it planned to do about him.

Its various writers mocked and wailed that Pullicino Orlando obtained his press pass abusively from the DOI, that PN ‘spin-doctors’ – do they exist? – had organised the whole thing, and that it was all a massive cover-up for evil plans to ruin Mistra Bay with a nightclub.

And we can’t have that, can we, when Malta Today is half-owned and bankrolled by somebody who’s got a pretty serviceable nightclub already.

Just look at what Saviour Balzan wrote, last Sunday. The man has no shame.

Outspoken, fearless and charismatic (Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando) was launched at Alfred Sant like a gladiator at the Coliseum before the 2008 election. And when it passed, and the Nationalist Party won by a slim majority thanks to his first count votes, they tried to destroy him, intimidating him by planting stories and inventing reports to make him resign. – Saviour Balzan, Malta Today, Sunday, 5 June 2011

Now read the following, and ask yourself what might have happened since then to make Saviour perform what he calls a 360-degree turn but is in fact 180 degrees. Don’t ask questions about his psychological stability, because it really wouldn’t be fair.

In the age of gender equality, if it’s a woman right to change her mind then a man can change it too, especially when he becomes infatuated by somebody as charismatic and gladiator-like as Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando.

Gonzi, as we all know, does not have the nerve or the gall or the courage to turn round to JPO and ask him to resign. (…) Reading through the testimony in the Mistra scandal – and again one cannot do this by referring to The Times, the other name for Malta’s Pravda – one cannot in a million years believe that Joe Saliba, Lawrence Gonzi and George Pullicino did not know about JPO’s mischief at Mistra before the election. And if that is the case, then they deceived the electorate and their own party. And they won the election by devious default.
(…)
Now really, if JPO is in absolute denial and not in the mood to realise that he is up to his neck in cow dung, then surely Lonzu is at a complete loss on how to face JPO.– Saviour Balzan, Malta Today, Sunday, 6 July 2008