Pierre Portelli was not having a great day today. It’s not something I brought about. Nickie Vella De Fremeaux hit out at Pierre Portelli without naming him at first over an issue which emerges from a conflict of interest he is in, combining his work at the PN with his private interests.
In a message to me, which I published, he insisted there is no conflict of interest as the production company he used to own no longer belongs to him but to his wife. And in any case, she’s doing work for the PN station he runs for free. I don’t write the rules about conflict of interest at the PN but if they don’t define the station’s owner buying work from his wife’s company as a conflict of interest someone needs to look at those rules again.
But there was something really rich in the message Pierre Portelli sent me. “Hope you do the right thing and straighten the wrong impression you gave on your blog in your zeal to report ‘the story of the day’ instead of focusing on what’s truly important: the fight against this corrupt government and its cronies.”
People who read this blog and follow the media Pierre Portelli runs can make up their own mind about who works on what’s truly important: the fight against this corrupt government and its cronies.
Perhaps Net News would care to report what civil society activists have been doing this past year in their own time as we stopped our lives to fight against this corrupt government and its cronies. While the party Pierre Portelli works for who actually employs people paid for by the state or by contributors and donors shows itself utterly indifferent to the fight against corruption.
On the basic fact that the real issue here is that the government is allowed to run riot with corruption while the complete chaos in the opposition goes on, there is no doubt Pierre Portelli is right. Except that, unlike me, he carries the responsibility to fix that problem.
So to sum this up. If Pierre Portelli sees fit to remind me of my duty to fight corruption, he would, one would imagine, consider it his duty to remember to fight corruption as well. Except that while it is fair to criticise me for being distracted from that sacred mission by the sideshow of an online battle between the Nationalist Party’s leader’s wife and his right-hand man, he was actually fighting that battle.
This is Opposition by Facebook posting. The Leader of the Opposition’s wife now refers to her husband as “your Kap” meaning, by inference that he is not hers. If the Delias were having a bit of a domestic that might be awkward but understandable. Who doesn’t?
But Pierre Portelli says Mrs Delia was “weaponised against the party”. She may have said Adrian Delia was not her Kap. But Pierre Portelli said the PN was not her party.
Will the disciples understand this, please? I mean those who keep telling me I should ‘shut up’ and wave the flag of the PN. This issue about whose ‘Kap’ Adrian Delia is, did not emerge in some dispute with Simon Busuttil or with the usual disgruntled suspects that are blamed for everything that Adrian Delia messes up.
It looks like the PN leadership is perfectly capable of harming itself without anybody’s help.
But then as this happens, it’s not just I who am distracted from the sacred mission of “the fight against this corrupt government and its cronies”. Although in my defence like my friends, and unlike it would seem Pierre Portelli and anyone at the PN, I’ve spent today preparing for a series of demonstrations, actions, law cases, interviews and communications efforts to put up just that fight as we have done for months now.
But Pierre Portelli who presumes to chide me for my distraction must also be at least just as distracted.
In all this, the party has no leader. Adrian Delia is not confronting Joseph Muscat about firing Chris Cardona. A bunch of ladies from Occupy Justice had to leave work quickly to go do that and place themselves as targets to the trolls, some in the employ of Pierre Portelli himself.
Adrian Delia is not pressing Chris Cardona to explain the lies he’s been caught in. And you start getting a feeling why that is when Chris Cardona retorts with the non sequitur, ‘have opposition MPs never been to parties with shady characters’?
Perhaps that is a question Adrian Delia cannot answer. And while he stammers and he staggers about instead of doing the job he’s paid to do, Pierre Portelli forgets his own job and instead of telling his boss he needs to fight against corruption he sends that message to me instead.
Partisans called on Super 1 radio on that propaganda phone-in show this afternoon to vomit their anger at “that traitor Delia who speaks to the foreign journalists and lies about the great Joseph” and they think they’re speaking about the Leader of the Opposition.
Pierre Portelli got a bit confused too.