Malta’s Law Commissioner has travelled abroad – and wants us all to know about it

Franco Debono has travelled abroad for his summer holidays, and wants to make sure everyone knows about it. He has spent two days – because he is such a busy man, or because he is one of those Maltese people who panic when removed from their environment for more than two or three nights – somewhere where he understands the language (so obviously, not London).

And he seems to have spent most of those 48 hours uploading to Facebook pictures of himself in key locations, like a Japanese tourist or a Commie-era Slovak who has left the village for the first time in 50 years.

On Thursday, a reader emailed me to say that he had spotted the Law Commissioner checking in at the Rynair desk at Malta airport for a flight to Pisa “ma’ mara ftit mibruma”. That would be the girlfriend of 12 years standing, Vanessa Grech, who hangs around while he continues to live with his parents, and whose primary function seems to be that of snapping her boyfriend in various poses for Facebook. Meanwhile, he pretends on Facebook that Vanessa doesn’t exist and that he spends his time communing with himself or with various dead fish on boats.

On Friday and yesterday (Saturday), he uploaded lots of pictures of himself without Vanessa in various Florentine locations. And then today, Sunday, it was business as usual, with photographs on a boat accompanied by the only thing that will listen to him: one of his dead fish. Summer holiday over, and back to safe and familiar territory where people know him and greet him in the street, reassuring him that he exists.

Of course, the ‘me and my dead fish’ photographs are taken by none other than Vanessa, who is usually on the same boat. But because she never features in those photographs, you’re left with the rather disturbing impression that the Law Commissioner is in some kind of highly suspect relationship with a sea bream he bought earlier at a fishmonger to pretend that he’d killed it himself. Vanessa would never tell.

Oh and incidentally: a bare chest, a dead fish and a gold watch in a Facebook picture – the kind of person I plonk in the category I call nouveau riche bla flus.

And today, Vanessa is back on a boat in Malta, taking pictures of her boyfriend and his dead fish.

Vanessa Grech, Franco Debono’s girlfriend and the one who takes all those pictures of him for Facebook.