The Labour Party has quietly shut down its English-language news portal

In complete silence, with no press statement or press conference, the Labour Party has quietly shut down its notoriously bad and very often unintentionally hilarious English-language internet news portal, Maltastar. And nobody noticed, which says a lot.

The portal was set up in 2001 and edited by Joseph Muscat for the next three years, as his full-time job. Glenn Bedingfield, who he has since installed in the Office of the Prime Minister as his communications aide, assisted him.

The idea was to reach that part of Malta’s electoral base which prefers reading English, but they couldn’t find sufficient people who knew enough of the language to write for it and report on a full-time basis, so the project eventually spiralled into ridicule.

Meanwhile, Muscat began to understand that it made more strategic sense to infiltrate and influence existing English-language media than to waste resources trying to compete with them.

The last tweet from Maltastar’s Twitter account and the last Facebook post were a year ago. The domain rights have not been renewed.