Major midlife crisis in orange trousers – turning 50 is tough

You can always tell when a man is panicked about turning 50 because he begins to wear 1. amusing tops, 2. amusing socks, 3. amusing ties, or 4. (the biggest crisis) red or orange trousers.

Red trousers are in fact a standard stock item in conservative menswear retailers in London so that the Midlife Crisis Brigade can find a pair easily when they pop in for their office suits and their tweed sports jackets.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, not high on Earl Grey for once, gatecrashed the celebrations at the Auberge de Castille last Monday, wearing a pair of burnt orange trousers and with his wife and step-daughter in tow, aftering walking in the parade down Republic Street, greeting onlookers and receiving their applause. I shan’t go into, again, what I wrote about men with very fragile egos and honour-and-shame fixations – you can read it in the post pinned to the top of the page today.

These orange trousers are a favourite. He wore them to the double interview of Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat at the InterContinental Hotel during the campaign. They attracted a lot of attention, but for the wrong reasons.

Pullicino Orlando and the Missus were conspicuously absent from the ministers’ swearing-in a couple of days back, some people thought. Not so – the absence was entirely to be expected.

Let’s not forget that they’ve got a VERY awkard situation there. Pullicino Orlando’s ex wife, Marlene Farrugia, and the man for whom she left Jeffrey, Godfrey Farrugia (Farrugia is her maiden name; they’re not married), are both now Labour MPs. And Godfrey Farrugia is a minister.

Meanwhile, Pullicino Orlando’s new wife, Carmen, stays as close to Joseph Muscat as possible, using the leverage she has through winding Jeffrey up to cause maximum problems for the Nationalist Party. That way she ensures that her predecessor, Marlene, doesn’t even get a look-in. The two are not on speaking terms and while Marlene is quite benign (I say this from experience), Carmen regards her with contempt (I know because she told me several times).

Jeffrey hates his ex wife, the mother of his children, with a virulent viciousness. He never forgave her for carrying on her affair with Godfrey Farrugia and for, when she was found out, packing up and leaving him. If you think he hates me, magnify that by a thousand and it’s what he feels about Marlene. They didn’t speak to each other for years – except briefly when one of their children was ill and they met at the hospital bedside, when he thought it was an opportune time to inform her that he would be fighting the case for divorce – and communication between them was through third parties. I have no reason to believe that this situation has changed.

I suppose watching the man who so dramatically cuckolded him, for years before he found out, the man with whom his wife ran off (and who can blame poor Marlene) being sworn in as Minister for Health – while he gets fobbed off with the retention of his potty chairmanship of the Malta Council of Science and Technology – was too much for a damaged ego like Jeffrey’s.

The situation is set to become truly combustible because it is very clear from Jeffrey’s latest Facebook post what his aims are: to build a constituency of support, repackage himself as a Labour politician, and then demand yet another pound of flesh: being accepted onto the Labour ticket in the next general election. I would say that he aims to go straight for his ex-wife’s/her companion’s constituencies and that he will also spend the next five years doing his ex-wife damage within the Labour Party.

This is a man for whom revenge and spite are his entire raison d’etre, with everything he does, thinks and says crafted to that particular end.

I don’t admire Marlene Farrugia as a politician but she is a decent person. She can take criticism far better than her ex husband and deals with it like a well-balanced adult, taking it all in her stride. I think she really needs to watch out now, because her ex husband and his new wife are too close for comfort and they don’t mean well.

Incidentally, didn’t Joseph Muscat say in January that his would be the most feminist government in Maltese history? Then why on earth, when he had the opportunity to add another woman to his cabinet, did he not give Marlene Farrugia a portfolio?

Maybe he thought, as Maltese men (and women) sometimes do, that women are content to experience things vicariously through their men.