No need for prudence any more: kullhadd ghal mar-rebels, ras!:)))))!!! Wooohoooo!!!:))))

The thing is, it’s not even funny, is it. It’s disturbing.

Now that Gaddafi is as good as dead, our politicians are scrambling to get on the I’m With The Rebels bandwagon.

Il-vera razza ta’ nies bla bajd u bla zejt f’wicchom.

We’re going to quickly strip Gaddafi of his Maltese decorations so that he will not die decorated by Malta, a fact that would otherwise be listed in the international obituaries.

How can they not see that this devalues the symbolism of the act, that it gives out entirely the wrong – if accurate – message? We are not stripping him of his honours as a matter of principle and in solidarity with his victims.

We are stripping him of his honours because it is safe to do so.

Moral acts mean less than nothing if you wait until there is no cost to yourself before you perform them.

What cheap, shoddy behaviour.

Now Joseph Muscat, scrambling over everyone else to portray himself as the hero of the hour, has followed the Libyan ambassador’s sorry example and rushed to disclose his dangerously covert cloak-and-dagger meetings with ‘representatives of the rebels in Malta and abroad, during which they discussed what the PL could offer in Opposition’.

This is more doublespeak, like the Labour Party’s doublespeak on the money it took from Gaddafi in its pre-2008 days, quoted in The Sunday Times today.

I, too, have met many rebels and spoken to them. There were lots of them protesting outside the Libyan Embassy every day for months and quite a few at the demonstrations in which Muscat never took part because Gaddafi was still on his throne and so it wasn’t prudent.

Rebels are rebels. The Transitional National Council is what he is looking for here, because that’s the official body. And I know for a fact that he hasn’t met anybody from the TNC.

My contacts tell me that the TNC did not have the most positive reaction when told that Joseph Muscat flew about in Gaddafi’s private jet (my own note: while criticising, if you please, the finance minister for flying in George Fenech’s).

He really does think everybody is as thick as his spokesman on European Affairs.

Any moment now and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five will make an appearance with a tartan rug and a hamper of ginger ale.

And this afternoon, after sitting on the fence for six long months and refusing to so much as mention Gaddafi by name, the Labour leader pulled the last remaining fence-post out of his butt and hauled himself down to Shipwrights Wharf, together with his lovely wife who had just climbed out of the Burmarrad swimming-pool at the 11th hour, to admire the work of those loading aid, with the air of King George and his queen visiting London’s East End after the blitz.

But there wasn’t much aid to be loaded, was there. Of course not. That’s what happens when you tell your people that Gaddafi was good for Malta. They become most uninclined to give things to the people who toppled him and cost them their lucrative jobs in Libya.

———-