Apologies for the down-time – I’m now watching Times Talk

Herman Grech and Mark Micallef have Glen Bedingfield, James Debono and David Thake on as guests. The show is skewed at the outset because any attempt at making a sane argument is over-ridden by the deliberate stupidity of Glen Bedingfield, another man who is pinned to his post by some kind of weird fixation with me.

Daphne this and Daphne that. I must say, the interviewers aren’t helping. Herman Grech has just jumped to Super One TV’s Janice Bartolo’s defence to say: “Janice Bartolo is not a public person. She is a journalist like me.”

And this in the midst of a squall of bitching by Glen Bedingfield about me. So apparently, I fall into a different category of non-public-person journalists who it is permissible to constantly rant about.

I’m sorry, Glenn. But Janice Bartolo gave up her ‘just a journalist’ status the day she began having an affair with the Minister of Justice. Now she is not ‘just a journalist’, but primarily the Justice Minister’s mistress. That puts her into exactly the same category as Michelle Muscat, and as James Debono just said, Mrs Muscat is a legitimate target for mockery, scrutiny and criticism. This is not just because these two women live with members of the cabinet of government, but because they shove themselves in our faces all the time while in that position.

Let’s face it – we don’t even know what the WAGs of most other members of the cabinet look like or who they are. That’s because they keep themselves out of the limelight. And so they are not legitimate targets as WAGs unless they actually go out and do something reportable.

Surely Herman Grech is not suggesting that the mistress of the Minister for Justice should be considered primarily as a ‘journalist’ even though she sleeps with the Justice Minister and works for the governing party’s ‘newsroom’. I can just imagine how that tone would change overnight were I to have a sudden brainstorm and take up with a member of the Labour government. I’d have entire television crews camped at my gate 24/7.

There’s another point. Bedingfield compares himself to Norman Vella, a public servant who hosts a political show on NET TV and has a blog. “If he can do it, why can’t I?” says Bedingfield. And the others let him get away with it. The main argument here is not that they are paid out of public funds, but that Bedingfield is closely associated with the Prime Minister and works in his office. And somebody closely associated with the Prime Minister, who works for him, in his office, can’t write a blog targeting electors. End of.