In politics to become a minister

Oh good grief. For a moment there I thought it was Jeffrey.

So now we see that Austin Gatt has been added overnight to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s hit list. It’s no longer just about Richard Cachia Caruana. In Jeffrey’s resignation letter, he has company.

Jeffrey will not be part of, he said to the Nationalist Party leader in that letter, a political party which has been “hijacked” by Richard Cachia Caruana and Austin Gatt.

Well, actually he used the verb ‘militate in’, which is never used in idiomatic English unless the grouping you’re talking about is the People’s Liberation Front or the Bader Meinhof.

And he made the mistake of showing that he fails to distinguish between party and government, by addressing his letter to the prime minister rather than to the party leader, which is what he should have done given that it is a letter of resignation from the Nationalist Party and so the prime minister, as such, has nothing to do with it.

The fresh bitching about Gatt might seem to have come out of the blue, but it hasn’t. Perhaps you missed the bit where, during last Tuesday’s hearing, Gatt told the executive that Pullicino Orlando said to him during the election victory celebrations of 2008 that he expected to be made a member of the cabinet, and if he was not, he would create problems.

I imagine that Jeffrey had forgotten he said this to Gatt, or perhaps he was hoping that Gatt had forgotten. In any case, now he’s got it in for Austin Gatt as well. The difficult thing for him is that he will have to share his missile-launch pad with his hated rival for the limelight, Franco Debono.

That he fully expected to be made a minister is something I can confirm myself. Back when he was still lying about his Mistra contract, he had visited to seek my help. It was the first time I had met him, but he turned up with two heavies – one of whom I now recognise as Stephen Ciangura, the bodyguard he has supposedly got himself for protection from his current enemies – who I asked him to please leave at the gate.

After he had lied to me, sat and chatted for a long while, probably forgot his other appointments, and looked downright delighted to be there on my sofa, he reluctantly rose to head off. Then he took me entirely by surprise by handing me one of his cards as head of delegation to the Council of Europe.

“Have one of these,” he said, or words to that effect. “I need to get rid of them because I’m soon going to be a minister.”

Indeed.

Then around two weeks ago I got a telephone call from one of his former canvassers, who had been persuaded to round up votes for Jeffrey only to have those electors round on him after the full extent of Jeffrey’s bad behaviour became known. “People thought we knew what he was up to all along, and that we helped con them into voting for him,” he said. “It was terrible.”

But the interesting bit is that a couple of days after the general election, Jeffrey called his canvassers together and told them that he had had a meeting with the prime minister. “The prime minister believed me,” he said to them. “And he told me that we’ll allow a few months to go by and for all the fuss to die down, and then he’ll make me a minister.”

So this is what it was all about. Unfortunately, he shall have to stick to pulling teeth and botoxing desperate housewives, while watching his ex wife become a minister instead of him, in the Partit Bla Isem government.