This column, and my blog, are often the reason why a number of Lil’Elves repeatedly lambaste me as an intolerant transgressor of the rights of practitioners of the right of freedom of expression. The supreme irony of their position naturally escapes the Lil’Elves completely.
They are blissfully unaware, perhaps because their chosen path leads down the road to equally blissful ignorance, that by seeking to stop me from criticising the apples of their eye, they are themselves stamping down on my freedom to express my dismay, disgust and discombobulation at the inane ideas some people choose to express and the way they choose to express them.
But when you think about it, trying to stop people from saying what they think has been Labour’s strong suit for quite some time, as we all know, and their collective knees jerk so swiftly whenever something irks them that it’s almost amusing. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I made a passing remark about how the Leader of the Opposition had reportedly been given a ride on the Muammar Gaddafi’s private jet. This prompted Labour’s director of communications, one Kurt Farrugia, to put pen to paper and deny there had been any such jolly, albeit so obliquely that you had to make an effort to figure out what he was getting at. He was also moved to characterise my literary efforts as rants becoming even more boring as the weeks go by.
No sooner had young Mr Farrugia’s missive seen the light of day than someone posted a link below the online version of his letter, by means of which it was made perfectly clear that Joseph Muscat had indeed enjoyed a trip on a private jet but it was the Libyan government’s not Col Gaddafi’s.
For this gargantuan slip, I grovel in abject shame. I mean, there’s such a vast gulf of distinction between Col Gaddafi on the one fist and his violent government on the other that even an utter moron such as I should have been able to tell the difference.
Or, to put it differently, I was basically right and Mr Farrugia and the Lil’Elves that popped up to give him moral support online were basically wrong.
Of course, a barrack-room lawyer who delights in being peevishly pettifogging would claim that being ferried on the Libyan government’s private jet is not the same as being given a ride by Col Gaddafi but, here in the real world, we don’t really worry about these fine debating points. I won’t bore you with the Twitter exchange I had last Saturday with Mr Farrugia, who has discovered this social medium and loves using it. Suffice it to say that Labour’s director of communications, on a public medium, saw fit to write: “delusional boċċa. Better you start checking your facts before you write that cr**.”
I have no problems with the dear fellow calling me delusional or with defining this stuff as something less than salubrious but I would have loved to have been able to give him chapter and verse about when his boss took a trip on Col Gaddafi’s government’s private jet. I was out having a constitutional at the time, so I couldn’t.
Who knows what gems I would have caused to fall from Mr Farrugia’s fingertips had I pushed him on the matter? We might have been provided with even more evidence of the way a modern director of communications for a modern political party engages with columnists, albeit specimens of that genus who are not known for being sympathetic to the party concerned.
He certainly hasn’t taken on board the maxim that you don’t pit yourself in print against someone who has a couple of thousand words at his disposal every week.
But, then, this is someone who, on the same public medium (Twitter) put out the immortal line, on Tuesday last, reading: “More incredibly ridiculous statements by anti-divorce crusaders. W*f is Beppe FA talking about?!”
Now on the matter of the urgency to have this country grow up and introduce divorce, I find myself, with some amusement, on the side of Labour but, seriously, is this the way its director of communications should express his opinion and, by necessary association, that of his party?
And to make his tweet even more revealing, he went on to provide a link to none other than MaltaToday. Not to KullĦadd or to Super One or to any of the media that are officially Labour but to MaltaToday. On the matter of what inferences you may wish to draw from that, I’ll leave it to you.
And so to the end bit, to annoy the people who, though they think I should limit myself to stuffing my face and generally behaving like a bloated plutocrat, rather than daring to make comments about people and their public utterings, inexplicably get cheesed off when I write about restaurants I’ve tried.
On Saturday, we had a sublime meal at Patrick’s Tmun, formerly Tmun Victoria. We hadn’t been for some time and I’d forgotten just how good the place is – you’d best book, too, because even on a wintry Saturday night, it was, quite rightly, crowded.
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