The Prime Minister: “Glenn Bedingfield doesn’t need my permission to do it”

The Malta Independent has doorstepped the Prime Minister on the subject of his communications aide, Glenn Bedingfield, and the (disastrously bad) blog he writes. The video is below and the story is here.

“He doesn’t need my permission to do it,” the Prime Minister said, looking down at the pavement and trying to edge past with a nervously awkward smile. Well, actually, yes, he does need his boss’s permission to do it. That would be the case in any context, let alone when your boss is the Prime Minister and your actions carry implications far beyond your personal self.

The fascinating thing here is that these are the people who have been bawling away for eight years that “the Nationalist Party” and “Gonzi” and then “Simon Busuttil” should stop me writing for my (infinitely superior/in a totally different category/miaow) website, even though I don’t work for the Nationalist Party, have no ties to it, no role within it, and certainly no position in the government or public office, ever.

Now here they are, justifying why the Prime Minister’s communications aide – the Prime Minister, I hasten to add, and not the Labour Party leader – is writing a truly idiotic and barely literate blog which mocks (or tries to) Opposition politicians, Nationalist Party aides and – it goes without saying – journalists who are critical of the government.

It’s all coming to pieces for them, isn’t it.

It’s not because he is paid out of public funds that he shouldn’t do it. It’s because he is a personal aide to the Prime Minister of Malta.

There are plenty of people who are paid out of public funds who are free to write a blog if they wish. They’re not a special aide to the PM.

Joseph Muscat himself was paid out of public funds when he was Opposition leader and constantly maligning people through his party media. But he was Opposition leader and that was somehow seen as his role.

But the Prime Minister is the Prime Minister of the whole of Malta and he cannot have an aide behaving in this partisan fashion.