Repeating the 1930s frame-up

Way back in the 1930s, Lord Gerald Strickland’s party was expected to win the impending general election. The PN believed that the only way they could win the election was to create a story which would have an enormous impact on Maltese and Gozitan voters, who at that time were considered the most devout Catholics in the whole of Europe.

As the local Catholic Church condemned anyone who was known to be a member of the Freemasons, the PN strategists of that time convinced a known drunkard by the name of Ettore Bono, better known as ‘Terinu’, to sign an affidavit stating that he had seen Lord Strickland taking part in an activity at the Masonic Lodge in Valletta, where he worked as a waiter.

The following day, a Sunday was Election Day, so PN supporters were stationed outside the entrance of each church and chapel in Malta and Gozo, distributing copies of the false affidavit. They were also helped also by quite a number of monks and priests, who openly urged the faithful not to vote for a member of the Freemasons. The effect was tremendous. The PN managed to “steal” that election.

This is what probably convinced Daphne Caruana Galizia, Simon Busuttil and his PN strategists, that repeating the same tactic was the only chance to beat Joseph Muscat’s PL movement. Alas, today the “Catholic” people of these islands are not the same gullible people of that time. They not only did not believe Daphne’s story allegedly given to her by the Russian Efimova, but also gave Dr Muscat’s PL a bigger majority of votes!

Now we all know that the ‘Egrant’ story was just an attempt at “stealing” power by inventing a political ‘frame-up’. Just imagine what would have happened today, after the publication of Magistrate Bugeja’s findings, if the PN had succeeded in “stealing” the June 2017 election due to an invented political frame-up? Eddy Privitera