So is Mrs Konrad Mizzi a Maltese ambassador now? How ridiculous.

For instructions on how to cry more effectively in public, Mrs Mizzi, please ring 9949 0084

If it weren’t for the fact that Mrs Konrad Mizzi might interpret this as a racist remark in translation and proceed to make yet another Poor Little Me scene complete with crocodile tears, I would have titled this post IRIDU IBELLGHULNA R-ROSS BIL-LABBRA.

In The Sunday Times today:

Dr Muscat said that while Ms Mizzi Liang had agreed to provide her payslip, her allowances were those of any ambassador and he felt her pay package should never have been the issue.

Damn right that her pay package should never have been the issue. The real issue – the one presupposed by the pay package – is what she is doing there in the first place.

Had she not been married to a cabinet minister, and had she not been recruited on the sly without an interview process or open call for applications, had she been operating from an office with contact details and in open scrutiny with a clear brief, journalists and the Maltese public would not have started off from the justified assumption that the ‘job’ is nothing but a beard for giving her money.

Is that an outrageous assumption? Of course not. It is the smart assumption to make, given that so many Labour cronies have been placed on the public payroll on precisely that basis. William Mangion is paid a full salary to ‘look for a garage for bands’. Frederick Testa is paid a full salary to ‘choose drama for PBS’. Lou Bondi is paid Eur54,000 a year to ‘organise national festivities’. I could go on, but I might run out of space.

Sai and Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat clearly think that everyone is stupid. You can’t blame them. In their position and on the basis of the last general election, I would make the same assumption, knowing what they know about how easy it is to manipulate public sentiment given the right amount of Chinese money.

Why is Mrs Konrad Mizzi being treated by the prime minister like an ambassador if she is not an ambassador? Why is he comparing her to one as though this were an obvious fact and we are dumb to miss it?

She’s not an ambassador. She does not work for Malta’s foreign service. At least, we haven’t been told that she now is doing just that.

FS3, my eye. So what is the total amount (gross, not post tax) that is being spent on this disaffected bride who has tired of living in an alien culture (and who can blame her? I would no more survive in China permanently than I can expect her to survive in the Mediterranean), for her salary and all allowances and other expenditure that is not covered by those allowances? With Maltese diplomats, this is part of their global emoluments.

What is being spent on her children and their education, on her husband the cabinet minister? Has she refused the spouse’s allowance for which diplomats are eligible?

What is being spent on her car and her chauffeur? Malta provides only its resident ambassadors with those. If Malta is paying her rent, why doesn’t she have a public address?

If she is in China to further the interests of Maltese business, and not of China, then why are Maltese businessmen and investors not told how to contact her?

And all this, of course, overlooks the fact that Malta already has a resident ambassador in China – a man who has made his life in China for the last few decades, runs a business there, has a Chinese family, and so should more properly have been made a consul, not an ambassador.