Jose Herrera: a two-hour lunch-break on your dime

I am working in the courtyard at the Kazin Malti and Jose Herrera, the Parliamentary Secretary for (of all things) Competitiveness and Economic Growth, has just left the building.

It’s a quarter to three in the afternoon and he has been here for the last two hours, smoking, drinking coffee, reading on his phone (probably this blog in real time, given that I have been uploading stuff right next to him) and chatting to his usual coterie of hangers-on.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this – in fact, practically every time I come here to work, he’s sitting at the same table with the same hangers-on, shooting the breeze.

Today, Manuel Mallia was here too, reading a newspaper for around an hour – but for once, not munching anything out of a paper bag. But he can take lunch-breaks as long as he pleases, because he is no longer a minister of the government.

Here is a photograph of them both on another occasion, with that crook Ivan Hallett of Floriana, a smuggler who is currently under prosecution for that crime.