Fat Gland’s elderly and inept spies

So yesterday I was at lunch at a restaurant in Valletta with a friend (a woman, I hasten to add), when at almost 3pm two old men came in and sat down at a table opposite us, and played at eating lunch.

Before long, a woman who was sitting at a big table next to them, which was full of our friends and people we know (a fact clearly unknown to those men because these hamalli are unconnected and out of the loop and don’t know who is who and who knows who), got up and walked across to our table. “Those men are filming you,” she said. “We sent you a text message but I don’t think you’ve seen it.”

I took out my phone and sure enough there was a message from a man at her table: “We think these two old men are filming you.”

Suddenly realising that the people at the large table next to theirs know us and had told us that we were being filmed, they got all flustered – and just as I was looking over and preparing to call the owner of the restaurant, they got up and left. So I took their picture as they were leaving (no, there wasn’t time to focus properly).

Of course, my friend and I knew that this was for the ‘blokk’ operated by the Prime Minister’s communications aide, Glenn Bedingfield, from his desk at the Office of the Prime Minister. And sure enough, it was.

Bedingfield might be interested in knowing that Carmen Ciantar, CEO of the government utilities billing agency and second estranged wife of the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, was there too – as was the President of the Law Commission, wearing his trademark vile brown shoes with a dark blue suit, and accompanied by his sidekick lawyer with the fishwife’s voice, Marion Camilleri from Sliema’s Lazy Corner. Incidentally, that’s a great match – Franco Debono should give up his mother and give her a go.