That’s exactly what scrutiny is for, Deborah Schembri: to keep sex maniacs, perverts, crooks and scoundrels out of politics

The Parliamentary Secretary for Lands, who answers directly to the Minister for Lands, Joseph Muscat, caused a stir this morning with an article in the Times of Malta in which she argues for laws to save politicians from the effects of scrutiny of their “private life”.

The trouble lies with her interpretation of “private life”. Private life, as defined under human rights law, refers to what occurs in the privacy of one’s home, with one’s spouse or partner and children. It does not mean ‘whatever a politician does outside office hours’.

When the Economy Minister goes to a foreign brothel, accompanied by his aide, while he is on official government business as a guest of that foreign government, that is not his private life just because he did it between the hours of 7pm and 10pm. Nor is it the Minister’s private life when he spends his downtime in lap-dancing clubs or goes to the Stable bar at 4pm, or even at 11pm.

It is certainly not his private life when his wife throws him out of the marital home and he borrows a luxury flat off a businessman with no rent paid until the matter was uncovered and reported by this website. And though the Economy Minister showed a cancelled cheque as proof of payment, we have no way of knowing whether his friend Silvan Fenech transferred the money back into his account.

Deborah Schembri is worried that people will not take up a career in politics if what they do in their ‘personal time’ is scrutinised by the press. So what she is saying there is that the Labour Party has no hope of attracting politicians who are on the straight and narrow, and who have nothing to fear from scrutiny of their activities. How many of us are interested in what the Foreign Minister does on the weekend or in the evenings? Well, exactly. We’re not. We know that he is probably at home with his wife, or visiting his grandchildren. The day a journalist writes a big story about George Vella’s “private life” is the day pigs will fly.

Not being a particularly rational person – I hesitate to say that she is deliberately deceitful – Schembri doesn’t seem to have understood that this is the exact purpose of scrutiny of politicians by journalists on behalf of the electorate: to find out what they are up to so that we can decide, on that basis, whether we want to vote for them or not. Our decision to vote for a MP or candidate is based also on whether we think they are decent people, and knowledge about what they get up to in ‘private’ is part of that.

We are not interested in whether they have had a row with their spouse or are having a hard time with their teenage children. We are certainly not interested in their choice of interior decoration. But electors most certainly have an interest in knowing whether a politician is hooked on hookers or whether he spends his evenings at lap-dancing clubs. All such information is extremely relevant in helping electors reach a decision.

“All it takes to get the country’s hormone levels up a notch is one blogger backed by a few sordid politicians and fewer still behind-the-scenes movers and shakers frantically clicking away on their laptops and raising hell about an alleged sex scandal. I say ‘alleged sex scandal’, because that’s all it needs to be, irrespective of whether it happened or not and whether it was a wardrobe malfunction or a blooper of Nixonian proportions,” Deborah Schembri wrote.

Except, of course, she didn’t. That is not the English of somebody like Dr Schembri, who can barely speak the language. Nor is it even the English of your common-or-garden Maltese person who speaks the language properly. That is the English of a native speaker.

The article is, however, disturbed in parts by the input of a non-native speaker who is clearly Maltese, using poor grammar and Maltese favourite words like “indulge”:

“Is it in the public interest what Kama Sutra positions our ministers are capable of contorting into and whom they decide to indulge with in tantric pleasures?”

This is a fake opinion piece written by somebody other than the Parliamentary Secretary for Lands, to which she has put her name as a favour because she is now part of the inner circle around the Prime Minister. And we can safely conclude from the arguments it contains that the Prime Minister believes that his cabinet minister and policy aide were in that brothel, which is why his argument now is “so what, it’s their private life and their private life needs protection from journalists”.