That’s Marie Louise Coleiro Preca put firmly in her fake, sanctimonious place

Mark Anthony Falzon, a columnist at The Sunday Times of Malta (by day he’s an anthropologist working out of the University of Malta), has put Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, Malta’s sanctimonious head of state, firmly in her proper place today.

Reading it was such a relief, after skimming through the piles of rubbish written by the sort of people who take words at face value and never put them into context. And who don’t put Marie Louise Coleiro into her proper context, either.

The track record of her personal life is utterly abysmal. When her biological clock was ticking hard in her late 30s, she deliberately got herself pregnant by a man who had a wife and children, with whom she had been conducting an affair, shattering another woman’s home and peace of mind and causing untold distress to his children, who still haven’t forgiven her more than 20 years later.

Her political track record is even worse: secretary-general of the Malta Labour Party during its worst years in the early 1980s, under the leadership of Prime Ministers Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Those years saw untold violence, corruption and violations of human rights, the murder and beating of interrogees in police custody, an accountant who worked for one of her corrupt party colleagues cut up with a chainsaw and his dismembered body parts thrown into an empty well, the ransacking of the Courts of Justice, the Archbishops’s Curia, the Opposition leader’s home and countless Opposition party clubs by Labour-Party-sponsored-and-protected thugs, the burning down of the Times of Malta offices and its printing press, the closure of private schools run by religious orders, the suppression of free speech, and widespread deprivation as shops emptied of even the most basic consumer goods and foodstuffs.

That is your Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, the pseudo-socialist now living in the lap of luxury in a former governor’s palace with a retinue of servants and an unlimited hospitality and travel budget, a life she began with a six-hour over-the-top ceremony that cost the earth was a triumph of crass vulgarity and extravagance.

And this after a lifetime of working for a political party which dedicated itself resolutely to violating human rights and oppressing people while claiming to do the opposite and revelling in the worst excesses of corruption.

This is exactly how I remember her, and nothing will get that image out of my mind.

And here she is with corrupt Labour government minister Lorry Sant, one of whose private accountants was murdered, dismembered with a chainsaw, and his body parts thrown into a disused well where they were found years later.