Any moment now, and Jeffrey will streak across the floor

This was part of my column in The Malta Independent last Thursday.

Franco Debono has taken, like his rival for the limelight Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, to fighting his tragic internecine battles on his Facebook wall.

It’s only a matter of time before, like Jeffrey, he begins posting pictures of his breakfast, of him reading in bed, of the spaghetti the woman in his life cooks for him (let’s not get specific about which woman that might be), and of the kittens which follow him home occasionally.

Yesterday, Franco – always one for a stale old chestnut – told his 5,001 Facebook friends that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. Shame, then, that he can’t write to save his life and that his syntax and grammar are peculiarly dreadful.

You won’t be deposing any despots with your punctuation, Franco, nor overthrowing any oligarchs. Try wearing a black beret and some dark glasses, then strapping an ammo belt across your chest. That might work better.

Now that poor, tragic Franco is upping the ante once more, we can expect some competing stunt from the Haz-Zebbug tooth fairy. He’s already thrown same-sex marriage into the ring but can’t get Joseph and His Amazing North Face Coat to play ball on a private member’s bill.

He can’t do abortion because he’s not that liberal and can’t handle the brickbats – and in any case, he felt it necessary to tell us, in the divorce debate, that he’s anti. You know, just in case we have him down as a baby-killer who wants to destroy the market for Pampers.

So what’s left? Not much, I’m afraid, apart from crossing the floor and making a public statement that it’s in honour of his grandfather, Labour politician Giuse Orlando (a friend of my Strickland activist grandfather, incidentally, so no aspersions there), who’s probably squirming in his grave at the behaviour of the grandson he never knew.

I can see that’s what Joseph and Coconut Kurt are gunning for. They had a show on Super One TV last night: L-Istorja tal-Partit Laburista, the rewriting of history designed to inspire pride in their abysmal party, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the Labour Party in its glorious heyday, when it was run by respectable people and not a bunch of slimy and barely articulate weirdos.

A sizeable chunk of that production focussed on the trial, for sedition, I believe, of Jeffrey’s grandpa. ‘There you go,’ I thought to myself on my bright turquoise sofa, ‘so very transparent. They’re trying to persuade him that his natural home is the Labour Party.’ Of course, Jeffrey’s natural home actually is the Labour Party, but not for any reason to do with his grandpa or the Labour Party of those days. He belongs in the Labour Party as it is today. In fact, he is a perfect fit.

If Franco carries on in this fashion, inspiring thoughts of prolonged stays at the Priory, where Kate Moss and others go when they are suffering from ‘exhaustion’, then Jeffrey will have no choice but to be even more dramatic. Instead of crossing the floor, he shall have to shed his clothes and streak across it, possibly pursued by some of those square-set chaps the Labour Party brought out at the counting-hall last Sunday, in their important black jackets marked CREW.