ED ZL needs to know not to drink and press Send

All these Christmas parties, all that drinking to forget about Air Malta and the attendant stresses, all the nagging from a social-climbing and power-hungry wife, all those dreams about Angela F (oops, sorry, that slipped out): ED ZL, the tourism minister, has gone and made a bit of a mess.

In a conspiracy to get rid of the permanent secretary at the Tourism Ministry – because the word ‘permanent’ in permanent secretary means nothing to the Labour Party – he wrote out a list of potential replacements that he would like to have instead of the apparently inconvenient Mario Rodgers, a civil servant for 40 years, and instead of sending it to the head of the civil service, the former General Workers Union man Mario Cutajar (another sleazy appointee drafted into the civil service by the back door), he sent it to Mario Rodgers.

And that’s how Mr Rodgers found out about the plans being made behind his back. The whole thing is so indecent, and so stupid, that it just beggars belief.

You know, it’s really extraordinary the way to get any senior or not-so-senior job, you have to go through a gruelling interview process and your CV is scrutinised and checked for fitness of purpose, track record, management skills, and so on. But then to run the tourism ministry show, and to sort out Air Malta’s fate, you get a lousy, average lawyer with not much track record except parading pompously around the streets of Valletta while being dragged to and from parties by his extremely pushy wife.