Worry about your crisis not mine, Marisa Micallef says

Labour's new adviser, Marisa Micallef thinks the Nationalist Party should consider its own moral predicament and worry less about her "alleged financial crisis".

She was responding to comments by the Nationalist Party's general secretary, Paul Borg Olivier, who said she was a victim of the financial crisis when she was in the UK and was then unhappy the government could not give her a job. "But the government is not an à la carte restaurant or simply contributing to 'pocket money'," Dr Borg Olivier said on Tuesday.

When contacted, Ms Micallef said she was very pleased to have been offered this "really interesting" role and took it on because Dr Muscat "believes in the middle way" and she believed in this too.

"If the PN wants to make nasty remarks, that is their choice but I choose to be dignified and professional in this situation. I am very surprised that the secretary general of the PN should stoop so low," she said.

"When I was Housing Authority chairman I served the people of Malta first, not the PN. This is in many ways a very natural transition for me, after 10 years of working with Malta's social problem."

She added that many Nationalists had e-mailed her to express their support for her decision and she stressed that she would not be giving any more interviews because that was not part of her new role.

Since her new job was revealed in newspapers last Sunday, Ms Micallef has chosen to remain quiet but in a letter published in The Times on Tuesday she listed a number of points that could indicate why she decided to make the switch from blue to red.

In the cryptic letter, entitled The Blurred Kingdom, she complained about the "coming down hard" on single mothers and that "the best jobs and positions are reserved for the blues".

"It wasn't just the reds who suffered. Anyone blue who didn't toe the line 100 per cent feared for their business, their children being refused certain jobs and more," she wrote.

When the Labour Party responded to Dr Borg Olivier's comments on Tuesday, a party spokesman said his argument was "a senseless attack which shows (Prime Minister) Lawrence Gonzi and the PN are in denial".

cperegin@timesofmalta.com