The Labour leader’s unofficial personal advisor, Mario Vella, is insisting that the party take a non-confrontational and subdued role until 2013, if it wants to win the middle ground and win the general election.
But despite enjoying Joseph Muscat’s respect, Vella is deeply mistrusted by Labour insiders for his past involvement with Alfred Sant’s ill-fated policies.
Vella was Sant’s former advisor, supporting him throughout his entire leadership, marked by his anti-EU stance and the removal of VAT.
Educated in communist East Germany, the left-wing ideologue has come a long way since then, now firmly rooted with financial advisory group Grant Thornton in Ta’ Xbiex.
He was formerly an employee of tax consultant Patrick Spiteri, when the latter was roped in to advise Sant on devising a tax system to replace VAT in 1996. Joseph Muscat too worked with Vella at Zimmerman House. Spiteri would later fall into disrepute over charges of fraud. It seems ironic now that one of Vella’s former colleagues then was none other than anti-Muscat crusader Daphne Caruana Galizia.
A former president of the Labour party, Vella’s Marxist past often catches up with him, most recently in his defence of Labour’s relations with Ralf Dahrendorf, who famously fell out with Dom Mintoff in 1971 over his education policies.
Writing in l-Orizzont, Vella defended a Labour statement on the late Dahrendorf which had omitted any reference to his clash with Mintoff. In typical Marxist verbiage, Vella wrote that Labour “needed to broaden its ‘hegemony’ in all civil society, it burnt thousand of allies that it desperately needed.”
And in an interview with MaltaToday, Vella said the Nationalist government’s “tendency towards senility”, citing their long stay in power, would “accentuate [their] incompetence. Now that the EU issue is settled, this government will appear in all of its inglorious nakedness.”
Vella has said the Labour media would “expose the emperor’s pathetic nakedness as intelligently as possible, as originally as possible and as often as possible. Without rancour, perhaps with irony, wit and humour… the Labour media needs to induce audiences to laugh at this government. A government that is laughed at is one that will eventually be laughed out.”
That was May 2003. Five years later, Sant would lose a general election for the third consecutive time.
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Search:
MALTATODAY
BUSINESSTODAY
Download MaltaToday Sunday issue front page in pdf file format
All the interviews from Reporter on MaltaToday's YouTube channel.
