Even if she doesn’t go ahead with a Labour party candidature, as former Sea Malta chairman Marlene Mizzi touted in a roundabout way on Reporter, she is one of the few pundits who can coherently present an argument when it comes to discussing the government’s state of affairs.
Having experienced first-hand the caress of privatisation, a style of government uncannily similar to a chapter from Revelations, Mizzi will never have a kind word for the unkindness of Austin Gatt for turning the state’s shipping line into a private monopoly.
“Many people don’t understand this concept” – she said this week of ministers who don’t distinguish their political responsibility from the autonomy that should be enjoyed by a public company’s commercial directors – “and they just want to butt in” (iridu jindahlu).
It’s a free translation, but ‘butting in’ – personifying the human bottom dislodging itself from its host and rudely taking charge of affairs – is somewhat telling of much of what happens in this country. A minimalist view of our politicians, no doubt, but not imprecise either.

Take for example Jesmond Mugliett’s very sore metaphorical bottom. Sitting on the horns of a dilemma as it is, his very own business partner and best mate Robert Sant is making him look like an idiot, the kind of ill-repute that does no favour to an incumbent minister, because the reconstruction of Manuel Dimech bridge is starting to resemble so many other projects whose names also start with an ‘M’ and a ‘D’.
A week is a long time in politics. But Mugliett’s stewardship of the Manuel Dimech reconstruction, supposedly in the able hands of his own chum architect Robert Sant, is beginning to feel like an aeon. Not good when elections are round the corner. Maybe the sacrifice of an infant found floating amongst the reeds to Osiris and Horus would surely get the job done faster – a trick that never failed the ancient Egyptians in their electoral promises on the pyramids.
‘Practical completion’, the operative word now being used, is expected to happen towards the end of March: suspiciously the right time to hold an election. The last time the Nationalists used a major roads project to prematurely celebrate a forthcoming election win, the outcome wasn’t as expected. It’s the kind of déjà vu that promises lots of watery, loose bowel movements.

I got a load of aspirational television watching this week, seeing as I have nothing better to do.
In marketing, aspirational products and shows are all about what the audience doesn’t have and wishes to have, or be, usually because they are too poor, ugly, miserable or plain members of reality itself (99% of us).
However – and this is what makes the marketing wheel go round – aspirational TV depends on an audience with the illusory belief that they might have a fair chance of becoming the rich celebrities, bling-blinging rap artists or b eauty queens they see on TV. And this they do by wasting their money on the island’s plastic surgeons, beauty parlours, jewellers, clothes shops, etc, etc – the very sponsors of these TV shows in the first place. You get the idea. You probably get the programme too, and also the presenter (but it’s usually his nose that does the opening of Arani Issa before anything else).
But what about aspirational TV which actually does nothing to relieve the misery it feeds upon – and whose sole prize goes directly to the presenter, rather than the participant?
Labour MP Silvio Parnis is the author of this new line of ‘dis-aspirational TV’. Like aspirational TV, he parades the miserable and unfortunate who place their hopes in his televisual prowess. But he doesn’t give them sponsored gifts or a miracle cure with a 24-hour slot.
No. They get their 15 minutes of fame (Smash TV standards of fame), his sweet nothings, and last time I watched, a slap-up meal.
What he gets, however, is a fast-track ticket to parliament, because more and more constituents vote for him purely on the strength of his neatly applied TV make-up and gelled hair. The reason the Labour party doesn’t come down on him like a ton of Labour voters is because in 2003 he got 4,157 first-count votes – the highest vote count on the fourth district. And you know what the prize is for the most popular MPs in a party which takes government? A Cabinet post. That really scares the faecal solids out of me.