Once more, the Taghna Lkoll government honours its own

Those who had gongs pinned to their chests by Marie Louise Coleiro Preca in yesterday’s Republic Day honours ceremony included Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the former US ambassador to Malta who became an integral part of the Labour Party’s Taghna Lkoll set, even turning up to a media event at the Office of the Prime Minister to lend validation to the crooked ‘American University of Malta’ plans in which a large tract of public coastal land was given to a sleazy building contractor in Jordan.

Then there was Rachid Marif, Algeria’s ambassador to Malta between 2005 and this year. In October last year, we discovered that Malta, through its consulate in Algiers which was run by the Prime Minister’s cousin Robert Falzon, had issued Schengen visas to almost 7,000 Algerians in just 18 months.

There was Maria Camilleri, the Prime Minister’s ‘special envoy to Arab countries’ (yes, really, “Arab countries”). And there was also Clifford Borg Marks, the man they appointed Malta’s ambassador to China even though he actually lives in China, is completely integrated, and has been there since he got a Commie scholarship to a red university back in the 1970s. He resigned the post last year.

And inevitably, there was Alison White, the British dancer who came to Malta in the mid-1970s to perform at the Preluna Hotel’s Skyroom nightclub. Everyday as a child I walked past the advertising board outside the hotel which showed her and another two young women smiling gamely while wearing small showgirl outfits and large feathers on their heads. At the Skyroom, she met the Mintoffian singer Renato, to whom I was forced to listen, every night, as he sang his Big 1970 Eurovision Hit ‘If Things Shouldn’t Go Right’, which is scored into my brain because my bedroom was beneath the Skyroom windows and there was no such thing as proper air-conditioning or sound-proofing in those fabulous Golden Years of Labour. They married. She got to be able to stay in Malta legally after her performance contract expired, and he got a beard until he came out of the closet round about the same time he began wearing a wig, and they both worked on A-M-A-Z-I-N-G Labour Party productions of that tired rock opera Gensna.

Ah yes, they also managed to slip a gong to Karl Izzo, a retired waterpolo player (when Malta is full of them) who just so happens to be married to Diane Izzo, the Taghna Lkoll owner of clothes shops who likes to hang around with Mrs Muscat, the Prime Minister’s wife.

Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the US ambassador who probably never had such a thrilling social life before she became part of Malta’s Taghna Lkoll Labour set, seen here with Prime Minister Muscat in his more prosperous-looking days.