Mark Micallef Taghna Lkoll (and soon to be everybody’s in Madrid, too)

Mark Micallef

I have just come across an email which I had missed uploading at the time – I can’t imagine why (it must have come in in the midst of some ferocious deadline).

It was sent to me on Friday night, 19 July, by somebody who was standing on St Barbara Bastion in Valletta at around 11.30pm when he saw the prime minister and Mrs Muscat, the Foreign Minister and Mrs George Vella, and the Energy Minister and Mrs Konrad Mizzi emerging from a house there.

He felt too awkward to take pictures (damn) but in any case, I knew even before I read the address whose house it was, as I had been there many, many times in the early to mid 1990s before we all discovered he was a Labour mole pretending to be anti-Labour: Mark Micallef.

Rumours of his appointment as ambassador to Madrid had been circulating already before 19 July, but were later confirmed. So he had the prime minister, the foreign minister, the energy minister and their wives over to supper, did he. God knows how influential and important he felt after 17 years in the frozen wastes of social contempt, but I don’t need God to tell me how he would have mocked and patronised every one of them inside his head because he has nobody now who he can do it with aloud for a laugh.

As for the prime minister, his wife and his men – well, what can I say. How sad to think they are accepting invitations from an individual who has been a social pariah for years, while actually thinking they’ve arrived because a ‘posh man’ has asked them to an intimate supper (because intimate is cheaper) at a ‘posh house’.

And they’re so impressed that they made him ambassador. If only they knew.

But that’s exactly why people like Mark Micallef support Labour: it has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with their ability to patronise and impress Laburisti from certain backgrounds in the way they can’t patronise or impress politicians and officials (or for that matter, supporters) of the Nationalist Party. Savagely aspirational Laburisti are easily impressed, don’t know who people are but only think they are, and are looking for ways in. This, in turn, gives people like Mark and his cousin Marisa Micallef a way in. Of course there are many others like them, but I don’t feel like mentioning them right now.

In any case, perhaps the prime minister ought to have a word with his minister Helena Dalli, or rather, with her husband Patrick. He painted a portrait of Mark Micallef, and when his fee remained unpaid long after the portrait had been delivered, with requests for payment being brushed off with excuses, he sent along a couple of heavies to remove the painting from Micallef’s possession. And no, it wasn’t Patrick Dalli who told me this.