“When I’m in Malta, I meet everybody”
Is John Dalli truly determined to make himself seem like some kind of Cosa Nostra boss and Malta like a Sicilian mountain village (not far off, but still, let’s not hype it up, shall we)?
Infamous quote from his Brussels press conference, in response to journalists who asked why he did not diarise or declare his meetings:
“When I’m in Malta I meet everybody. I talk to anybody who asks to meet me.”
This prompted one of the journalists to tweet: “If you want to meet EU Commissioner Dalli, just go to Malta.”
He kept trying to justify it, clearly thinking that it’s a good thing to “listen to people”. In this, he catastrophically misses the point that EU Commissioners have no constituents, and shouldn’t be listening to anyone at all, except in a formal capacity, because whoring their ears round town leaves them wide open to accusations of abuse.
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He got the ‘bourg’ right, though. Even Joseph Muscat would get that right, except that he might confuse with Hamb(o)urg.
correction…confuse it with ….
Sorry, this comment should be with the one about Luxembourg.
Yep, that was one long week.
Swedish Match said they’d asked for years to meet Dalli and finally, in desperation, dispatched a ‘young female lawyer’ to Dalli’s poolside hideaway in Gozo.
One hopes that he wasn’t wearing a Karmenu Vella style budgie-smuggler.
“When I’m in Malta, I meet everybody”
That is what wheeler-dealers do.
They have to as it is an important part of their business.
John Dalli is essentially a wheeler-dealer that should have never been sent to Brussels. He was an embarrassment waiting to happen.
I CAME TO MALTA
AND ALL I GOT
WAS A MEETING WITH JOHN DALLI
Comment of the week
When he’s in Malta he even finds the time to meet Joseph Muscat and the nice people at Super One.
Exactly right, just like he had no business poking his nose into Maltese politics and being partisan about it.
I’m too old for this kind of thing.
This is the root of Dalli’s downfall.
When you are an EU Commisioner you just DO NOT meet everybody.
You have to be very, very selective who you associate yourself with.
If, for example, you meet only just once with a well-known unsavoury character,like Sivio, then your position as Commissioner becomes untenable.
Your position becomes irrevocably compromised.
This is what Dalli did not, and could not, understand.
With his Qormi background, he was under the false impression that as long as you are not caught with sixty million euros stuffed inside your underpants you are high and dry.
Dalli is portraying the rest of Malta as a sprawling Qormi.
Maybe in his mind, it is.
Malta Tourism Authority is launching a new promotion campaign in Europe with the following slogan: When in Malta, do as the Dallis do….confessing…praying…bootlegging.
Have all you GonziPN bloggers forgotten, that Lawrence Gonzi, has publicly stated that he is proud to have appointed John Dalli as commissioner ? Do you then consider Dr. Gonzi to have failed too in choosing John Dalli , just as GonziPN failed in choosing B.W.S.C. ???
I am not a “GonziPN blogger”, or even a blogger, but yes, I do consider the PM to have failed spectacularly in choosing John Dalli.