I’m surprised the Nationalist government didn’t put Yana Mintoff in a position of trust, too

Malta’s ambassador to Italy, Vanessa Frazier (a career diplomat, if you please) spent the entire morning today going hysterical on Facebook, ranting and raving about her blasted minaudiere bag, her outfits, her friends, her frivolous preferences, and “a certain blogger”. You could hear the screaming and the sharpening claws all the way from Rome. The last time I saw anything like that I was 14 and in the school courtyard for what we used to call recreation.

I decided against uploading screenshots because when one woman is unfit for purpose, all women get the blame by chauvinists, that one woman becoming a proxy for the rest of us as they ask sarcastically whether it’s that time of the month again. And somebody must have spoken to her, because in the afternoon she took them all down.

I have only this left to say: that at this stage I’m surprised the Nationalist government didn’t put Yana Mintoff in a position of trust in the Office of the Prime Minister or Dar Malta in Brussels or wherever else was key to operations. Perhaps it’s because she was in Texas until 2012, and they couldn’t.

Mrs Frazier (nee Grima Baldacchino) has a father whose sister is married to George Vella, the Labour Minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party when Alfred Sant led it. And she has a mother who was one of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff’s lady friends when Mintoff was doing his very worst. But Mrs Frazier somehow managed to talk, fawn, text message and phone-chat her way in to the Office of the Prime Minister, as a trusted ‘defence adviser’ to PM Lawrence Gonzi.

This was just so wrong, risky and stupid that I don’t know where to begin. It would have been daft even if she were intelligent, let alone when she is not. Can you imagine Prime Minister Muscat appointing Beppe Fenech Adami’s niece to his private secretariat as his ‘defence adviser’ or anything else? It’s never going to happen, and with good reason.

This is not about discrimination or cronyism. It’s about the fact that trusted persons in sensitive posts should be exactly that. Everybody else can and should work anywhere else in the public sector or government offices, irrespective of family connections or political views. But you don’t trust somebody who has family Christmases and Sunday lunch with your sworn political enemy, because families talk to each other, even if it’s only a chance remark let slip over the telephone with somebody’s mother.

This photograph is on public view on the internet, uploaded on Malta Today’s defunct Flickr page. It shows Vanessa Frazier’s mother, Maria Baldacchino, at L-Gharix with Prime Minister Mintoff and his hernia belt. The man in the middle is Jean Agius, who at the time operated out of Soho in London. I have uploaded it to underscore the point, as no words can, that this woman’s daughter was one of the Gonzi government’s most trusted advisers.