From the Stable to Level 22

Saturday night last week, the Minister for the Economy was at the club called Level 22 in the Portomaso tower, the epicentre of the demimonde where sordid middle-aged men and ones even older than that go biex jghabbu xi wahda Russa (cypher for any woman from any country that was behind the Iron Curtain but who was born after it came down in 1989/90).

Despite having 14-year-old twins from his first wife and two small children from his second wife (born before they married because he couldn’t marry because he couldn’t divorce, and then he turned out to be one of those men for whom the divorce law was a nightmare because he didn’t want to marry anyway), it looks like he isn’t busting a gut trying to get his wife to take him back and keep family and home together.

As the person who saw him there put it: “Kien qieghed jintreda quddiem kulhadd ma’ mara ohra”.

The Minister for the Economy…oh, but hang on. I think this is an appallingly inappropriate way for a cabinet minister to behave only because I’m not liberal. At least, that’s what he told me.

Imagine if Chris Cardona were to hear my views about men in their 40s who bail out of two marriages in quick succession, leave a train-wreck of four young children, and then spend their time in bars, nightclubs and Medasia Playa knocking back the drinks and picking up a variety of other women while dossing down in Silvan Fenech’s Portomaso shag-pad.

Britain didn’t make Peter Stringfellow its Chancellor of the Exchequer or any sort of cabinet minister.

And while the Minister for the Economy was at Level 22 with his girlfriend, the Minister for Justice walked into the Jazz Festival hand in hand with his girlfriend, Super One reporter Janice Bartolo, and headed straight for a seat next to CHOGM chief and face cream maven Phyllis Muscat. This was five days before he appeared in court for the first hearing of his separation proceedings from his wife, having failed to come to an amicable arrangement with her.

The Minister for Health and Energy, meanwhile, was probably where he often is during his downtime: in his boxer shorts on his balcony on his phone, visible to everyone walking past the Nazarene church in Sliema who happens to look up.