Ministers yesterday needed to somehow emerge as winners after a court ruled that they had behaved in a way that does not fit anyone with the country’s interests at heart. (That’s what the court called them, using a descriptor for a dictionary term the court could have opted for: fucking traitors).
Ministers needed to live down a court ruling that struck down one of the major lines of policy of the Labour Party: the privatisation of a large chunk of the national health service, finding the policy had been executed on the back of fraud.
It’s not that they struggled to apologise and tried to put on a brave face. It’s that they had the gall to expect our gratitude for the heroic achievement of not having Konrad Mizzi in the government anymore. Mission fucking accomplished, right?
That’s after they stuffed Konrad Mizzi – that corrupt, greedy, flailing, incompetent, lanky, secretary-fondling, secret-company asset-populating, inanely-grinning, socially awkward, barely functioning, code-switching creep – down our throats as a star candidate who would rescue us from Tonio Fenech.
Konrad Mizzi was not forced out of government by any labour of theirs. He was thrown out by Joseph Muscat like a box of treasure dumped off the side of a sinking pirate ship, the last desperate attempt of the captain to survive by dumping the loot and murdering his crewmen. And Joseph Muscat’s ship sunk because there was a moment, when Yorgen Fenech was arrested, in which the country realised why Daphne Caruana Galizia had been murdered and the people’s anger could not be stopped.
Few seem willing to recognise any of this, but Daphne Caruana Galizia’s work and her taking off brought down Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, and Chris Cardona. All those ministers, from Robert Abela down, who yesterday somehow managed, in the midst of the flames singeing the hairs in their nostrils, to find ways of mocking the opposition for their failures, did their utmost to prop Muscat et alia up for as long as they could and only abandoned them when they feared being dragged down with them.
Consider Chris Fearne yesterday, incredibly congratulating Adrian Delia for winning the court case against the government he has been a minister and deputy prime minister of for the entire time that Adrian Delia was battling the government in court.
In a thinly veiled reference to Konrad Mizzi, Chris Fearne said he regretted he wasn’t the minister with the responsibility to manage the privatisation contract even though he was already health minister when Steward were greenlit by Muscat. The excuse goes that though Konrad Mizzi was not minister of health, as minister responsible for Projects Malta he oversaw the relationship with Steward.
This doesn’t exonerate Chris Fearne. Chris Fearne had been deputy prime Minister since July 2017 outranking Konrad Mizzi. Does that mean nothing at all?
Konrad Mizzi stopped being minister responsible for Projects Malta on 26 November 2019.
What has Chris Fearne done in all that time and all the time since to address the fraud at the hospitals contract? What did he do to withdraw the concession? The point is he could have if he wanted to, which means that since he didn’t, he didn’t want to. Now that he claims he is so happy with Adrian Delia winning the case against the government because as a result Steward are out, he must have wanted precisely that outcome before it had been secured. If that were true, the logical thing for him to do would have been to sue Steward himself for breach of terms and for fraud to get their contract cancelled.
Adrian Delia was leader of opposition and after much effort he could prove he had sufficient legal standing to challenge the contract. Chris Fearne was (and is) the health minister, for crying out loud, the holder of the constitutional office which is, by definition, the contracting authority and the party with the most obvious and self-evident right to lodge a dispute against Steward in court. And yet.
What about the €100 million promised by Konrad Mizzi, Chris Fearne retorted yesterday? He did that when, again incredibly, he mocked the PN for promising in its manifesto for the 2022 election to immediately throw out Steward. ‘You’d have had to pay €100 million,’ he said, ‘while aħna tal-Lejber, genius incarnadine, allowed Adrian Delia to win the case for us first and save us the €100 million.’ What an utter fucktard.
If Konrad Mizzi was not authorised to promise the €100 million – and the evidence heard in the case brought by Adrian Delia shows that he wasn’t because the permanent secretary in the finance ministry, the finance minister, the health minister, and in a roundabout way even the prime minister, Joseph Muscat, all said they first heard about the €100 million in the press – then the promise does not bind the government. That indeed is what the court found on Friday: that the €100 million promise is all part of the same fraud and therefore just as invalid as anything else in the contract.
Which means that if Chris Fearne was as keen to have Steward out without having to cough up the €100 million – which is what he said yesterday – he should have filed the lawsuit against Steward himself, rather than rely on the leader of opposition to do his fucking job.
It’s not like Adrian Delia had a walk in the park. Every step of the way lawyers for the government and its agencies challenged even his right to complain in court. Every step of the way they rejected his arguments and did their utmost to persuade the court to find against Adrian Delia’s case, presenting evidence, perorating, and writing unending encyclicals which, thankfully, the court found to have amounted to a pile of stinking shit.
That 5-year-long truth cannot and should not just be reversed with a casual remark by a minister lying to parliament and the public to save his skin.
The fact is after Daphne Caruana Galizia first reported on the Vitals swindle, the Nationalist Party committed to reverse the privatisation. Chris Fearne said nothing of the sort. At the 2017 general election the PN beat its drums against the Vitals deal. Chris Fearne said nothing of the sort. When Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed, we protested in the street listing the corruption in the hospitals’ acquisition as one of the causes of the injustice she had suffered. Chris Fearne said nothing of the sort.
When we called out the Steward deal, Chris Fearne insisted this had been the real deal. When Konrad Mizzi resigned in disgrace Chris Fearne did not change his tune. He never denounced the deal or did anything to have it removed. When the press revealed the €100 million promise, Chris Fearne never said his ministry and his government did not feel bound by it because it had been fraudulent, and he gave no notice to Steward in any sense that they would not be honouring it. Implicitly he made the €100 million promise his own.
When Adrian Delia sued the government that Chris Fearne was the deputy prime minister of, he never said he sympathised with the leader of opposition’s case. He never instructed his lawyers to stand down and switch sides against Steward.
Only after Adrian Delia won the case, did Chris Fearne go beyond the “private conversations” he claims he had and publicly denounced the Vitals/Steward deal and said he wished he had been the responsible minister because he would have stopped it happening. The private conversations of politicians are as meaningful and useful as the drunken rant of some windbag in a village boċċi club, which means they mean shit. The only action and speech that matters is what a politician does publicly, formally, and legally. Before yesterday, Chris Fearne did fuck all and what he did yesterday he could do because the opposition did his job for him. He’s worse than useless. He’s useless and he doesn’t know it.
Chris Fearne’s behaviour is the conduct of cowards who stab corpses with bayonets to get a medal for bravery.
Why do I speak of Chris Fearne, when it is obvious that he is behaving no differently to Robert Abela, co-author of the Vitals scandal, who is now denying the credit he earned as are all the other ministers who sat beside Konrad Mizzi in parliament all those times that useless wanker stood, all pink and clammy, to chant ‘shame on you’ in the general direction of Simon Busuttil?
Because the process of becoming a virgin is especially deserving of remark.