Ah, so AST went nuts on Radio Malta. What a surprise.

Published: December 20, 2011 at 11:59am

A seasonal reminder of AST's special relationship

I have just read (there were pressing matters to be getting on with) the report of AST’s interview on Radio Malta, and listened to the recording.

All the points I wish to make are so obvious that I needn’t bother: the way he descends into defensiveness and irrational anger when he is asked about Gaddafi, for instance.

Of course you had a special relationship with Muammar Gaddafi, Alex.

You told us about it all the time. You saw it as your competitive advantage over all others bar Karmenu Vella, on your re-entry to the party riding on a donkey called Joseph.

You even organised a big event – to which you invited businessman John Dalli of John Dalli & Associates – at Labour HQ, to commemorate 40 years of a special relationship between ‘Malta’ and ‘Libya’.

That was in 2009, when Malta had had a relationship with Libya for a thousand years and more before Gaddafi took control in 1969.

And the first visit which you organised, as Labour’s mammoth-from-the-ice international secretary, was to Gaddafi’s court, taking your Dear Leader there to meet him.

Except that he didn’t see you and palmed you off onto some juniors instead. As they say on the street: burn, baby, burn.

Do you know what I find most fascinating about this interview, Alex?

It’s your attitude towards your interviewer, the very same attitude I remember so well from the days when the worst of your party’s thugs used to hang around the entrance to your ministerial office on Merchants Street, ready to launch an attack on demonstrators (it happened to me – postal workers saved me by pulling me into the post office opposite your main door).

And a few weeks later, one of those thugs – I even have his name – reversed hard into my car and smashed it, because I had the temerity to put my hand on the horn as a suggestion that he move along and stop blocking the road.

He was parked in the middle of Merchant Street, you see, chatting to his friends who were hanging about in your doorway as usual.

When I proceeded to the Valletta police station to make a report, with his car registration number, the police officer behind the counter looked it up to get the name of the owner and turned sheet-white.

“I am not going to allow you to lodge a report, for your own safety,” he told me, registering the fact that I was hugely pregnant. “If anything happens to you, a bomb or something like that, I will feel responsible.”

That is the kind of country you and your fellow-ghouls ran, Alex. A country in which the police protected vulnerable citizens by refusing to allow them to lodge reports, for their own safety, because they themselves could do nothing to control Labour-sponsored thugs.

Faced with questions you didn’t like, from an interviewer you considered to be not servile enough, Alex, you threatened, intimidated and raised hell, doing your best to make him quake in his boots at the thought of the Chinese-style retribution that lies in store.

But this is no longer 1986, Alex. And we don’t have you to thank for that.




10 Comments Comment

  1. Not Sandy :P says:

    The PL’s international secretary is on Facebook, but not in his own name. He’s put up a series of photographs of that 40th anniversary commemoration:

    https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.126348369085.107140.126230289085&type=1

    Alex Sceberras Trigona is in almost every single photo, along with other luminaries like Toni Abela, Anglu Farrugia, and John Dalli.

  2. james says:

    In the late seventies (or early eighties), at the time when Lorry Sant had just unashamedly opened the “Pixxina Lorry Sant” , I recall seeing, painted, in enormous letters “A.S.T.” in Tigne, Sliema.

    Although I was very young I remember asking two elderly staunch Labour supporters whether, or not, the letters stood for Alex Sciberras Trigona.

    After showing quite some embarrasement through their facial expressions they told me that it stood for Assoccjazzjoni Sportiva Tigne. I never found the truth but my suspicion remains that Alex Sciberras Trigona was following Lorry Sant’s footsteps.

  3. Louis says:

    Hanzir kien u hanzir jibqa’

  4. TROY says:

    And just before the cock crowed three times AST denied his close relationship with Gaddafi.

  5. ciccio2011 says:

    AST was quite lucky, actually, that North Korea’s Dear Leader died a couple of days after, not before, that Radio Malta interview.
    Has he sent his condolences yet?

  6. Francis Saliba MD says:

    I empathize with Daphne.

    When a bomb went off on my doorstep, at the behest of a Labour Minister, the court apponted expert exhorted me not to mention the name and kept on doing it for 24 hours. I declined.

    Individual members of the police force confirmed my allegation and added details about the identity of the MLP thugs who had actually planted the bomb.

    I sympathised with their excuse that that was not the time to speak out because of the danger to themselves and the family.

    By the time it became safe to speak out the honourable minister “with the heart of gold” had been called to settle accounts on the Other Side.

  7. Plato 2011 says:

    An impressive performance by Alex Sceberras Trigona. Almost as good as Anglu Farrugia’s.

    Perhaps Joseph Muscat should send him off with a suitcase, travelling the world’s few remaining dictatorships to teach them about democracy.

  8. Botom says:

    Alex Sceberras Trigona as a minister included his mechanic in his official government delegation on an official visit abroad.

  9. Matt says:

    Alex Sceberras Trigona is deserving of scorn primarily for the fact that he signed a treaty with North Korea for weapons and training of Maltese special forces – to use not against any external enemy but the enemies, it has to be assumed, of the Labour government.

    Wisely, Alferd Sant kicked him and his likes out of MLP party but for unexplained reasons Joseph Muscat has resuscitated these bad people and is giving them prominence once more.

    Malta deserves better.

Leave a Comment