Stick to weaselling planning permission for your clients, Musumeci

Robert Musumeci, the Prime Minister’s consultant on planning who is the champion specialist in obtaining planning permission for his clients, has been hitting Twitter again, no doubt in a few seconds of downtime between talking to planning officials.

“The fact that Nationalists chose a 3rd party when given the choice speaks volumes. The situation is even more serious than I thought,” he tweeted yesterday.

Despite his tussling with the mathematical formulas which I imagine are required for the structural engineering part of his job, his logic has never been anything other than disastrous.

You are what you vote. If you vote Labour, you’re Labour. If you vote Nationalist, you’re Nationalist. And if you vote AD, you’re AD. There is no such thing as a Nationalist who votes Labour. Nationalist is not an ethnicity. It is a choice in the polling booth.

Mr Musumeci is clearly referring here to Marlene Farrugia and Godfrey Farrugia, two people he dislikes because he is so close to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, that virulent attention-seeker whose clinic door was mysteriously set alight (just a little) when his first ex wife made it to parliament, he failed catastrophically, and their daughter wrote a paean of praise to her mother.

People did not vote for the Democratic Party, for the simple reason that the Democratic Party was not on the ballot sheet. Marlene Farrugia and Godfrey Farrugia were listed under the name of the Nationalist Party alongside all the other Nationalist Party candidates. At law (and this has been established by a judgement in the Courts of Justice already) and in the minds of those who voted for them, they were Nationalist candidates.

Had they not been Nationalist candidates, they would not have been elected. I voted for all the ‘orange’ candidates on my ballot sheet, and I did so because I know the electoral law and I know that at law they were Nationalist candidates, so it was safe to vote for them. Had they been under the list of another party, even the Democratic Party, I would not have given them even my final vote.

If I were living in Sliema, I would have given my No. 1 vote to Marlene Farrugia, safe in the knowledge that at law she was a Nationalist Party candidate. Nobody, not even Robert Musumeci, can say that I am somebody likely to choose a third party over the Nationalist Party. The reason I wouldn’t choose a small party and the reason I would have given my No. 1 to Dr Farrugia are the same: I know how the electoral system works.

Though there has been no analysis of the ballot sheets yet, from what I hear through counting agents and people who were at the counting-hall for work or observation, my choices were pretty much typical. People who voted Nationalist voted for all the candidates on the Nationalist list, including the ‘orange’ ones.

On the 10th District, people did not vote No. 1 for Marlene Farrugia and stop there or at the other orange candidates. They voted for all the Nationalist candidates. Godfrey Farrugia, in the 7th District which is his home constituency, was elected on the decisive strength of 400 No. 2 votes which followed on from No. 1 votes for the Nationalist Party’s deputy leader, Beppe Fenech Adami.

Robert Musumeci is a spiteful man who has made some very bad choices in life and cannot now rearrange them. In this he is no different to his fellow-traveller Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. He just comes across differently because he is calmer and likes to portray himself as a rational person, while the other is avowedly hysterical and rarely in control of his emotions.

People in this situation, I find – especially when they have been unbalanced in some way by the consequences of their own behaviour and decisions – will spend the rest of their lives trying to justify, to themselves and others, why they behaved that way. This is one such example.

In one’s private and social life, it is possible to avoid people like this: the woman who won’t stop going on about her ex husband, 20 years after he left; the man who is still calling his ex wife all the names under the sun, when she has long since had a family with somebody else; the woman or man who speaks with venomous resentment and a desire for revenge against the individual Nationalist politician (it would have to be Nationalist, given their long duration in government) who did this or that to him or her.

But when people insist on being as public as Robert Musumeci and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando – both of whom hold public positions and also insist on plastering the airwaves and the internet with their views – it is not quite possible to avoid them entirely. They are poisonous, awful men, and only in it for themselves.