How bad things are when people who live in an English-speaking country don’t understand English

And it’s even worse when they are aides to the Prime Minister of Malta, which sells itself as a destination for the teaching of English as a foreign language. One aide to the Prime Minister, on his ill-produced and ill-conceived ‘blokk’, has written an entire post accusing me to his followers of having said that Keith Schembri (the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who works out of the same building as Bedingfield) should be shot.

Cue a litany of morons, saying that I should be reported to the police, to the Cyber Crime Unit, that this is a crime and a threat, and so on. There are no limits to idiocy, made more pathetically ruinous by the inability of these poorly educated people to wrap their heads around idiomatic English. People living in Italy or Germany can be excused for not getting past the basics in English. People living on an island which was a British colony for 165 years, and where English sits with Maltese as an official language, have NO such excuse.

“He/she/they should be taken out and shot” is a standard, frequently used idiomatic expression with which these losers are clearly unfamiliar. I can’t say I blame those of his followers who speak nothing but Maltese (and badly at that), but an aide to the Prime Minister should have a better level of education and speak, write and understand proper English instead of the sort of English that Matteo Renzi speaks.

No, I did not say that somebody should shoot Keith Schembri, you twits. Though quite frankly, you should be talking about how best to get rid of him yourself before he brings your entire ship down with his suspicious offshore operations.

How about explaining to your followers, Bedingfield, what it means when the Prime Minister’s chief of staff is discovered (to his deep and abiding horror) to have four offshore companies in Panama, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar? And those are just the ones we have rooted out so far.

Ah, but you can’t do that, can you, because they’re paying you to be their mouthpiece. I think you should be taken out and shot.