Chris Cardona: Now what?

As we predicted in yesterday’s editorial, the cloud funding put up by David Thake found it almost ridiculously easy to get people to contribute no less than €69,500 in 36 hours to annul the €47,000 in garnishee orders demanded by Minister Chris Cardona and his associate in the brothel-gate saga. That is over and above the amount that was needed. One man offered €5,000. Others smaller sums. What remains over will be given to charity, Dar Merhba Bik.

Now that the minister’s nuclear option has been fired, and now that it has been effectively counter-checked, what is the state of play?

The allegation is still there. The court case still has to begin. The minister’s name is still under attack. The battle of proofs still has to begin.

And if the minister thought that by getting a garnishee order would somehow change the state of play, it is very clear now that it has done nothing of the sort and that it actually made things worse for the minister who is now being reported to all sorts of European institutions.

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Minister Cardona’s axe seems to have blunted, in other words.

It would seem the minister lacks the sort of friends who would take him aside and give him prudent advice. In a game of strategy he played his hand and has made his situation worse.

But then the minister has been playing badly ever since this issue cropped up. He spent – rather, wasted – days mouthing angry statements when he should have been proving he was elsewhere when Daphne said he was in the brothel.

But even before this came up, he has not been particularly careful in the company he keeps, the places he haunts. It is of course his right to live his life as he sees fit, but then he is a minister, a member of Cabinet, and he must be careful to avoid the kind of situations where he could find himself blackmailed.

No one is asking the minister to live his life according to the moral code of the church, though it would not be as bad thing if he and anyone else were to do so.

Unfortunately, due to the hypocrisy that reigns over Malta, we have had in the recent past, men of high moral standard who were kept back from promotions that should have been their due because they were living with someone who was not their lawful wife. It was only after years and years of suffering that this was corrected.

That is one thing, but it is quite a different thing to live a dissolute life. The minister, any minister, any person in the public eye, cannot put up two fingers at people’s public opinion and live life as he and only he thinks fit.

And then, if he lives this kind of life, he should not be surprised and shocked when a story erupts concerning his own private life. Maybe that story is a lie, and so it merits a denial, and, why not, a libel case. But going overboard and causing a garnishee order that would have crippled anybody else were it not for public contributions, has taken things far beyond the normal pale. The minister has now been served. And rightly so, irrespective of the real merits of the case.