Labour's idea of communicating with columnists: chasing them with a Super One camera and calling them 'witch'

Something I said in court which hasn’t been reported: people like Saviour Balzan’s lawyer, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, cannot understand that it is not just normal but a democratic requirement for politicians to speak to journalists and for the prime minister’s office to have a person delegated to that purpose.

Politicians are answerable to the public and so they have to take questions from the press and impart information to the press. The press cannot function properly without this system.

Labour politicians like Saviour Balzan’s lawyer just don’t get this, and they see any contact between a journalist and a politician (unless the journalist works for Malta Today or Super One or L-Orizzont, of course) as covert and strange and fraught with ulterior motives.

As I explained in court, Toni Abela can’t understand that politicians are obliged to talk to journalists and that journalists are obliged to talk to politicians, because the Labour Party’s idea of communicating with the press is not to communicate with the press.

When Labour was in government, there was no way on earth you could ring a cabinet minister’s office and ask questions, still less get them answered. And if you rang the Labour prime minister’s office with questions, you’d be told where to shove them.

You had to take your written questions to the Department of Information (remember that, colleagues my age?) and then wait for days only to conclude that nobody wanted to answer them.

And when Alfred Sant was leader of the Labour Party, he refused to take questions at all. He’d call the press to a press conference only for them to discover that it was not a press conference at all but a live press statement, following which the man would walk out.

In the 2003 election campaign, around 70 journalists and media people signed a declaration of protest against his behaviour. Imagine that, a party leader campaigning to become prime minister and he refuses to answer questions from the press.

That’s what Toni Abela is used to. And that’s why he finds it so strange when journalists ring Nationalist politicians and those Nationalist politicians answer them, or build bridges of communication.

The Labour Party’s idea of building a bridge of communication with this particular columnist is to chase me about town with a Super One camera while insulting every member of my family and calling me a witch. Obviously, they must think this is a much better strategy than giving me a call and saying let’s meet for coffee so that we can tell you about our amazing policies, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.