A few months ago, in an article entitled ‘Commonwealth Blues’ I wrote that “one commentator – an embittered and insufferable snob – even took the Prime Minister to task on account of his heavily accented English, as it sounded to her ears”.

A friend of mine drew my attention to the blog run by Daphne Caruana Galizia in which she had replied to this comment. I do not normally read the blogs but I had been warned that this particular entry by Malta’s arch internet troll would amuse me.

I make no apology for publishing Caruana Galizia’s piece below because it is instructive to get the full flavour of what she said if readers are to make a proper judgment:

“I can no longer stand the sight of an old man debasing himself in this fashion.

“And that is quite apart from the fact that prostrating oneself for a prolonged period at the age of 80 carries the risk of never being able to right oneself without permanent damage to one’s spine – a slipped disc, at least.

“Martin Scicluna forgets that, as one of his own kind (though not in temperament or in any other way), I am perfectly placed to know the truly insufferable snobs are those who patronise people like Joseph Muscat and who enjoy the process of feeling socially democratic by doing so.

“I have long held the theory – several years at least – that the contempt of people like Martin Scicluna (there were so many others, out of the same mould) for the Nationalist Party started when they began to perceive its image and its key figures as what I can best describe as lower middle-class.

“People like Martin Scicluna despise the lower middle class in a way that they don’t despise the working class, the pool from which their servants were provided in a time-honoured relationship. The lower middle class, however, are seen as jumped-up imposters who fit nowhere into the scheme of things and, worse still, who refuse to understand that they are manifestly inferior in every way to people like Martin Scicluna…

“People like Martin Scicluna therefore despise them and turn instead to the Labour Party which, made up as it is largely of working-class people who have a great deal of money but who are nevertheless working class in mentality, are greatly impressed by them and their social superiority because they have been programmed over generations to think of Martin Scicluna’s caste as something special…

Caruana Galizia’s views should be unacceptable to all right-thinking people

“These working-class politicians enjoy being patronised in return – because they don’t see it as being patronised but as having acquired the society of Very Important Tal-Pepe Persons.

“The trade-off here, though it is largely unconscious, is that Scicluna and his like get to feel socially democratic, edgy and tolerant (they are stuck in the 1960s) by mixing with ħamalli tal-flus who have been elected to government, while the ħamalli tal-flus who have been elected to govern feel they have arrived because Scicluna and the likes of him are licking their spittle.

“Because he is from a different generation, and possibly because he was never known for his intelligence (lack of intelligence is effectively masked by eloquence), Scicluna does not understand that I have absolutely no mealy-mouthed qualms about taking people as I find them. If a person is a total prat, the fact that he is working class, uncouth and with a terrible accent will not stop me saying he is a total prat. Real snobbery would be refusing to say so on the grounds that one does not speak negatively of those one thinks of as social inferiors.

“And if another person is a total prat but grew up round the corner from where I did – albeit in World War II – and is from my social background, then I will say so too. As Martin Scicluna knows only too well.

“I am a liberal democrat: prats are prats whether they are Joseph Muscat from Burmarrad or Martin Scicluna from Graham Street, Sliema, and I have no compunction about saying so either way.

“Insufferable snobs are those who enjoy patronising Joseph Muscat because it makes them feel 1960s-hip and tolerant (‘some of my best friends are black communists and one-legged Jewish lesbians’). But if Joseph Muscat were to ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage, it would be a different matter.”

It is 43 years since I had to face a fishwife haranguing me during a riot in the Bogside in Londonderry during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. But the same feeling gripped me then as it did now reading this piece of self-serving invective.

I felt I had been “savaged by a dead sheep”.

I am in favour of free speech. The need for independent journalists and free comment are crucial to a vibrant democracy. I naturally realise, as a commentator in this newspaper, writing on a range of subjects in which I am not averse to criticising the Maltese Church, the Labour or Nationalist parties, that I should expect people to disagree with me. It comes with the territory.

People can judge for themselves whether Caruana Galizia’s response to my article was even rational. There is something demented and unbalanced in her uncontrolled reaction.

Phrases like “Tal-Pepe Persons”, “lower middle class”, “working class”, “ħamalli tal-flus” roll off her pen, bad-mouthing and taunting whole swathes of Maltese society who – for reasons best known only to herself – she looks down upon.

This outdated language can only be regarded as malicious, a far cry from intelligent criticism. It is not worthy of her as a journalist. She demeans herself and those who read it.

As she has dragged my age into the argument (I am 79), I may be permitted to observe that she is 50 years of age and shows it.

There may therefore be truth in reports in another newspaper that her climacteric has lasted a long time and she may therefore be excused her bitter view of the world. But can this possibly condone her utterly bigoted intolerance?

She has form when it comes to her unacceptable views on class in Malta, having years ago referred disparagingly to one of Malta’s best prime ministers as “merely a village lawyer”.

Seeking to argue that I despise the “lower middle class Nationalist Party” and this therefore leads me to support the “lower middle class Labour Party because I can feel superior and can patronise them” takes a very special and twisted, not to say unhinged, logic.

Caruana Galizia remains pathetically stuck in a poisonous groove. She represents a surviving, disagreeable element whose personal attacks alienated so many former PN voters and contributed significantly to its downfall.

What she says about me doesn’t matter. But her views should be unacceptable to all right-thinking people and I hope the new Nationalist leadership, which is rightly anxious to make a clean break with its recent past, will now publicly dissociate itself from her unacceptable attack on thousands of hard-working Maltese.

Did her piece reacting to mine contain one iota of evidence to show that she is not an insufferable snob?

That she is Malta’s most vindictive troll is indisputable. I leave others to judge whether she is also a total prat.

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