The real reason they’re targeting Ann Fenech is because she fits the socio-demographic profile they most hate

Ann Fenech is clearly going to the Labour Party’s/government’s target in the run-up to the next general elections. As I know through personal experience, it will only get worse. Ann Fenech’s face is up on a Labour Party billboard now. My face was up on a Labour Party billboard in the summer of 2012 – and I am a journalist, not a political party official like Ann Fenech.

Why do people like me and Ann Fenech become special targets for the Labour Party? Why do they go after us with a viciousness that is personal and irrational? Why do they reduce themselves to inventing stories, spinning lies and devising sustained means of character assassination that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud?

It is because we fit the socio-demographic profile that the Labour Party has been programmed over decades of viciousness to hate, the socio-demographic profile that the Labour Party will only tolerate in individuals if those individuals publicly support it as ‘switchers’ and crawl to it.

People who are not alive to the fine distinctions in social demographics will not see that Ann Fenech belongs to a highly particular demographic, a very small one. The Labour Party is very much alive to those fine distinctions and it is one of the reasons it was so successful in its targeting over the years 2008 to 2013, while the Nationalist Party, which chose not to identify or recognise them, was not.

To make the Labour Party/government see red even more, Ann Fenech is a woman. And she is not a woman who flirts, wears hooker shoes, plays nice, or spends hours under the Botox needle. She is also sharp, forthright and has a straight-to-the-point-don’t-beat-about-the-bush way of speaking that makes men with an inferiority complex and psychological ego issues (make that a large percentage of Maltese men over the age of 40) see flaming red. Women like Ann Fenech provoke in a certain type of man – a very common type in Malta, I’m afraid – the instantaneous, driving and all-consuming urge to tear her to shreds and knock her down.

The liberal and progressive Labour Party will now go after Ann Fenech with an axe and chainsaw and won’t be happy until they make her bleed. Because we can’t have a sharp woman from the social class we most love to hate telling male politicians where to get off the bus with their stupid arguments, can we? Ma tarax – this is a male playing-field, and the only women we tolerate are very fat and complacent ones, dim ones, ones who acknowledge male superiority, let them speak first and always let them win the argument, and ones who are grateful for being allowed to sit on the sidelines and be quiet while the men strut about.

Get ready for it, Ann – I’ve been through 25 years of that hell with the full onslaught of the Labour Party machine: Super One TV, Super One radio, KullHadd, It-Torca, L-Orizzont, Maltastar, anonymous slander on the internet, sustained character assassination, the full works. There are thousands of people out there who have never read a word I have written because they are illiterate, semi-literate or don’t know any English. And yet they hate me because they have been exposed to two and a half decades of sustained and vicious Labour Party propaganda which has told them they should hate me even though they have no real idea why.

And then they want smart women to go into politics and journalism. Progressive and liberal, my eye – the Labour Party is the Party of Entrenched Misogyny and Class Hatred. Its favourite victims and targets are (still) Austin Gatt, Richard Cachia Caruana, Ann Fenech and me. Just ask yourselves what the one thing is that we all have in common. It’s the very, very narrow social type – like a red rag to the Labour bull.

Stay strong, Ann – Malta’s women are behind you. Don’t let the misogynistic bastards get to you.