It’s 2016 and they still want the limelight

It’s a little hard to believe that this island is still having to contend with the erratic behaviour and warped, egocentric tantrums of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Franco Debono, both of whom were installed in high public office by the incoming prime mi

And all these years down the line, these two who can’t stand each other’s guts are still acting and reacting in tandem. When one sets out his stall in the limelight and displays his latest tantrum on it, the other rushes to Facebook to drop a few heavy hints, fly a couple of kites and try to get some attention for himself. The only sort of attention those two need, but most certainly don’t want, is professional – but I won’t say what kind to save my editor the time and trouble of editing it out. Let’s just say it’s a dietician’s or a masseuse’s (but it isn’t).

The Science Council’s executive chairman is going berserk all over Facebook – so appropriate, wouldn’t you say, but then this country is bonkers – because the Times of Malta, in a leading article a few days ago, has taken him to task for using the Courts of Justice to petition the government and internet service providers to shut down blogs and other internet sites which publish photographs of him and the girlfriend he put on the state payroll as his “personal assistant” travelling abroad or eating out in restaurants. Apparently, it’s quite all right for the two of them to publish any such photographs themselves – albeit carefully curated ones – but not all right for websites which are out of his control to publish pictures of him and his girlfriend (who he insists on describing as a private citizen, when she is not) which he has not curated.

Now Pullicino Orlando is shrieking insults at the Times of Malta on his harridan-andlout-infested Facebook pages, and his state-paid girlfriend, Miss Lara Boffa from the Labour Party’s billboards, is getting agitated on hers too. The nerve of these people is unbelievable: feature heavily in the Labour Party’s electoral campaign, have your politically-appointed boyfriend put you on the state payroll at the organisation he heads, carrying on dating him and doing as you please at that organisation, clutter up your Facebook page with pictures of your hot dates (cue the sound of throats being cleared), and then behave like a martyr and victim under assault by legions of the corrupt.

Not to be outdone by all this crazed attention-seeking, Franco Debono has briefly taken leave of his 425 caged canaries and other birds in his trapped collection and let go of the bird-seed for a minute to tap out a message on Facebook that he hopes will steal press attention away from Earl Grey and his “personal assistant”. Labour supporters, he wrote, have been queuing up to encourage him to stand for election on the Labour Party ticket. They even include ‘soldiers of steel’, he says. The press immediately went into overdrive – it is the silly season, after all – speculating whether the Labour Party has invited Debono to become an electoral candidate. As someone who has had to contend with his unusual (the editor probably won’t allow the adjective I really want to use) behaviour for at least eight years, I can tell you exactly what his Facebook message really means. It means that he wants the Labour Party to ask him to be a candidate, but the Labour Party isn’t biting. So he is going to begin his usual tactics of suggesting that crowds of supporters want what he wants and that the Labour Party (like the Nationalist Party before it) had better comply if it knows what is good for it.

Before long, Pullicino Orlando will find something else with which to up the ante, and then Debono – who, we all need reminding, is Law Commissioner and doing nothing for the salary he receives for that post – will intensify his campaign for another seat in parliament as he is clearly feeling left out of the loop. And so it will carry on until 2018 and what looks to be the start of another five-year term with Joseph Muscat as prime minister and an ever-increasing colony of freaks, weirdoes, the corrupt and the psychologically unbalanced.