The Sunday Times interview: Phyllis Muscat as head of CHOGM committee – another of Muscat’s catastrophic decisions

Phyllis Muscat travelling in club class on a double family holiday to Italy with the prime minister – that’s a whole lot of Muscats

Read Caroline Muscat’s fantastic full-page interview in the print edition of The Sunday Times today – I’ve uploaded a PDF here: Phyllis Muscat Interview

The woman is beyond ridiculous. When people are completely unaware of their lack of fitness for purpose, of what the job entails and their inability to perform it, when they don’t even know that they don’t have the required skills because in their ineffectual minds ‘anyone can do anything’, then you know that they are catastrophically incompetent.

This does not apply only to Phyllis Muscat, but to the best friend and protege who appointed her: the prime minister, with whom she travels on a regular basis on family holidays, and whose family she hosts for days out on her ‘boat’ in the summer.

They are so incompetent that they don’t know they are not fit for the required purpose. If anybody had asked me to head up the CHOGM organisation committee, my response would have been, amid gales of laughter: “What, are you nuts? I’m not qualified, I don’t have the know-how, and I don’t know the first thing about the subject. You need a very senior diplomat for that, with a strong team of experienced diplomats around him.”

But Phyllis Muscat, with her extensive experience as a theatre nurse at St Luke’s Hospital and a business selling face creams to beauty salons and pharmacies – a job I did at 17 when I left school, at a time when it was much more difficult to the point of impossibility, because it involved battling Labour government departments which were stewing in corruption for import quotas and import licences during the Grand Era of Import Substitution – took it up with no hesitation.

She thought it would be just like organising that AWFUL and tacky fair of ‘Maltese goods’ which she did for the Labour Party before the general election.

What a prize idiot. Take her out and shoot her. This is where I become absolutely infuriated. Now people will not say ‘Phyllis Muscat was unfit for purpose and the stupid, arrogant fool is too stupid and arrogant to know it’. They will say ‘Women are hopeless. Appoint a woman to a top position and look what a mess she makes of it. She doesn’t even know how to answer questions in an interview.’

Mrs Muscat should be sacked immediately and senior diplomats brought in to rescue the situation. This is something truly serious and important we are talking about, not a Labour mass meeting or a fiera tal-artiganat Malti.

A few days ago, media offices received a fax – yes, a fax; people were startled as the machine stirred into life; younger ones had never heard the sound – from Phyllis Muscat, telling us in garbled language with important information missing that some publication or other would be the official publication for the meeting. It was signed PHYLLUS MUSCAT. We were rolling around. As somebody said to me amid the hilarity, “Ghal naqra mhux Phallus.”