Godfrey and Marlene Farrugia are particularly isolated in Parliament these days. The PN leadership has somehow focused their fixations on them speaking of the two MPs as if somehow they cost them an election. And Labour gives them the contemptuous treatment Maltese people reserve for those they perceive as traitors.
The two were exceptional in distancing themselves from the filth accumulated in the Labour government. They were welcomed by the PN with tears and applause before the 2017 election. But as we all know everything changed since then.
The Nationalist Party this week responded to Godfrey Farrugia’s criticism of it for knocking out his Parliamentary motion calling for Konrad Mizzi’s resignation by reminding him that he had voted against a similar motion when he was still whip for the Parliamentary Labour Party. ‘You do not have the credentials to fight corruption,’ they told him.
That’s an odd position to take. Clearly, if the PN is ever going to win an election a few thousand people who voted for Joseph Muscat’s government in the past will need to switch sides. If anyone who has ever voted for Joseph Muscat’s party is to be snubbed and rejected by the PN, the party will never make any headway.
It’s another reminder that the PN seems to have forgotten who its real opponents are. Competing for votes with PD is child’s play. They need to take votes from Labour. That’s where their focus should be.
In that visible isolation, something quite chilling happened yesterday. Marlene and Godfrey Farrugia were teaming up yesterday annoying the bejesus out of Chris Cardona. Though Chris Cardona may have a different idea on this, some would say they were doing their job of making the life of a government Minister with so much to answer for a little bit harder than he’d like it to be.
At one point he turned on Marlene Farrugia and told her “issa ġejja tiegħek”. Literally, that translates as ‘your turn will come’ but in English, it sounds like something a moderately irritated ticket inspector would say. In Maltese, it is a different category of chilling.
Challenged by the Speaker Chris Cardona clarified he did not mean that as a threat.
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it wasn’t.
But after all we’ve been through, shouldn’t Chris Cardona be more careful in the way he addresses women that get on his nerves?