Whoever gave fish a bad name? A loan shark is one who practices usury and a red herring is, well, a damp squib of an excuse. A gauche haircut is a mullet. And a fishwife… I suppose the less said the better.
Up until now, kippers were nothing but a hearty breakfast for those living around northern England and some Nordic states. But this was only until recently.
In his final run-up to the leadership election of the UK Conservative Party, the iconic Brexiteer Boris Johnson raised his hand holding a frozen kipper. Before this, the party faithful had claimed that a new EU regulation had destroyed the commercial viability of the Isle of Man kipper fishing industry by requiring that each frozen kipper to be attached to its own individual plastic ice pack when in transit.
After Brexit, kippers will be cheaper, Johnson claimed while bowing to the rising applause in the hall as the crowd cursed those meddling Brussels bureaucrats!
Within 24 hours, it became known that the regulation he spoke about was not part of EU law at all but was, in fact, a UK health requirement, which meant that Johnson was either intentionally lying or, at best, someone had him swallow some rancid mackerel bait.
I was struck by the easy comfort and shamelessness with which some politicians lie, and by how idiotic we voters are for believing them.
To be fair, our ignorance stems from the primal disbelief that someone would abuse of our trust so blatantly.
We emerge from a doctor’s clinic with a prognosis and a prescription that we rely upon. Our lawyer’s advice is usually safe enough to act upon. If these professionals lie to us, we can sue them for malpractice. But when politicians lie to us – and that’s nearly all the time – all we can do is shrug our shoulders and hope that in the midst of developers’ dust and cranes, the traffic and the rest of the misery caused by an unsustainable, quick-quid economic policy, things will somehow work out. Someday soon, no poor man will be left standing.
I was struck by the easy comfort and shamelessness with which some politicians lie, and by how idiotic we voters are for believing them
Recently, the Maltese Prime Minister declared that his administration has, over the past six years, “improved the lives of the people notably”. The Transport Minister quickly followed up and complained about people complaining about everything that he and the Dodger have done for them. He is as spot on as that kippers story.
Take the case of our top-level diplomat, Neville Gafà – the ex-shop assistant, ex-’medical visa official’. People complained because they did not know which ministry was footing his well-earned salary.
The Health Ministry had sacked him and, surprisingly, the Foreign Ministry completely disowned him.
A door-stopped Prime Minister replied that he “was doing great work” but, strangely enough, he had no idea which ministry was paying him and thus benefitting from his great work.
A few days later, it transpired that Gafà has been working at the OPM in Castille for a period of six months and it is fair to say that he would have duly reported his great work to the Permanent Secretary, or the Chief of Staff or to the Dodger himself. Rumour has it that Gafà met the Dodger in the lift on a July afternoon and pulled out a copy of his contract to review with the Dodger himself. What a kipper story!
And then we have the case of the struggling American University of visas, which became a reality just before the Vitals Great Hoax and the db/ITS land give-away in Pembroke. We only need to check these for kippers.
The American University of Malta (AUM) is an educational front that has been operative for nearly three years with a campus of a dozen or so students who are mainly transient.
People complain about the Dodger’s rush to give the Jordanian construction mogul acres and acres of ODZ land on the cheap to build an accommodation complex for over 3,000 AUM students. This all sounds quite fishy, I know, but the Dodger says this university is coming along “brilliantly”. Stop complaining, people!
A group of faceless foreigners agree with Konrad Mizzi to invest €200 million in upgrading, privatising and running three local hospitals.
They have no experience in the health industry and no due diligence was carried out. Sure enough, after a year and a half, and after being paid anything between €50 and €100 million, they run off with the money without having invested a cent.
The Dodger says Konrad is an indispensable negotiator and immediately put him on to the db Group affair to fix the ITS land buy. And we all know how great that turned out.
Nevertheless, the Dodger’s word has to be our bond. If we can only cross the Rubicon of suspicion, blow away the premise of a Hearnville and Tillgate connection to Egrant, and feed off the grass from the fields of gold like sheep of the L-Aqwa Żmien; then and only then will we stop our negative, frivolous complaining.
Till we cross that line and place our blind trust in this man, we are doomed to be stuck on an island battling the stench of the Dodger’s kippers.