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Perhaps it is because the leader of Alternattiva Demokratika, Harry Vassallo, writes for nearly every newspaper published in Malta that he has run out of facts on which to base his opinions, and has had to resort to his imagination and conjecture in his column for your newspaper last Sunday (12 September).
Having decided, on no grounds whatsoever but only with the sort of ‘moral conviction’ that Alfred Sant gets from time to time, that I had written The Times editorial about the MEPA golf course decision (11 September), he proceeded to write a piece that aggressively criticized me for doing so. Reading his hysterical fit-in-print on my return from an island far more pleasant than ours and where there are no Lilliputian obsessions masquerading as ‘journalism,’ I laughed out loud at the nuttiness of it all. I didn’t even know the golf course decision had been taken; I was on holiday and had left strict instructions that I wished to receive no dispatches from Lilliput. I wished to forget for two short weeks about the existence of Lilliput and all its horrid little-minded Lilliputians.
Dr Vassallo only had to pick up the telephone and ask his editor at The Times whether I wrote that editorial, and he would have received the clear and unequivocal answer: No. Instead, he chose to air publicly his gross suspicions, and to use this pretext to fire off a barrage of insults and near-libelous accusations, besides the offensive and untrue comment that I “cost Ray Bugeja his job” as editor at The Malta Independent on Sunday “while preserving” my own.
I did not cost Ray Bugeja his job. Mr Bugeja, with whom I remain on extremely good terms, was fired for his decision to publish the court judgement of Dr Sant’s marriage annulment, on the basis that Dr Sant was at the time Prime Minister and the public had a right to know his views about the institution of marriage, which are referred to in that judgement. My view was that he was correct in his decision, because the public does have a right to know whether the Prime Minister believes in the institution of marriage or not.
I was also disgusted when he was fired, and communicated my disgust accordingly. However, I had nothing to do with the publication of that court judgement; I did not write the front-page story which covered it, and I did not obtain the court copy on which it was based. I had my own copy already (I wished to know my Prime Minister’s views on marriage, as is my right), having obtained it as any citizen may do through the court archives. Again, Dr Vassallo has made the serious mistake of substituting fact for conjecture and rumour, a very worrying trait in a politician, as Dr Sant demonstrates often.
If Dr Vassallo were truly sharp, he would have picked up immediately the many clues in style and sentence construction which make it glaringly obvious that I did not write that editorial. He did not pick up even the most telling clue of all: the reference to Simon Tortell as Mr, when as Dr Vassallo is very much aware, I know Dr Tortell to be a lawyer. Dr Vassallo is unperceptive, but he is also touchy. Directed to The Times’ editorial by his article, I found it to be well balanced and rational.
Yet to read Dr Vassallo’s pompous, posturing and melodramatic piece, written in the mawkish and injured tones he tends to prefer in his adopted role of put-upon victim and martyr, you would think that The Times had chosen to crucify him in a remake of The Passion. The editorial mentioned him in just two sentences, which are these: “What is worrying is the claim made by Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Dr Harry Vassallo, soon after the hearing, that Malta can never sustain a golf course that soaks up so much water and electricity. In effect, this means that according to Dr Vassallo no such new golf course can be built anywhere in Malta or Gozo.”
How Dr Vassallo can have interpreted this as a vicious and aggressive personal attack on him is beyond me. It says some worrying things about his personality.
There is another fact that Dr Vassallo got badly wrong. I have not worked on the Rabat golf course communications project for the last two years, though I did work on it long enough to see first hand the tactics employed by Alternattiva Demokratika and its cohorts in trying to sabotage anything they choose not to agree with. Quite frankly, I was revolted.
Dr Vassallo makes a good folk leader, but if he wishes to be taken seriously as a politician by people who, like me, make a pragmatic decision when voting, rather than an emotional one based on anger or envy, then he will have to stop performing like a makeshift version of Alfred Sant. Unleashing a stream of crazy accusations based on mere suspicion is the kind of behaviour we have come to expect from the leader of the Labour Party. God help this country if we are now going to have the leader of Alternattiva Demokratika behaving the same way.
Daphne Caruana Galizia
Ta’ Xbiex
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