The Labour Party in Malta is again coming under withering fire – from Daphne:

… somebody with a Big Brain came up with the idea of taking the now infamous image of a Labour ballerina (mittilkless aspiration) originally designed for a billboard and using it for those giant cubes they chose instead of bill-boards.

U ejja, mhux xorta: instead of redesigning the image to fit the cube, so that there was one ballerina on each of the four sides, they wrapped a single large ballerina around the cube. If you approached from the north you got an eerie hand waving at you, and if you approached from the south you got an amputee.

But what about their message?

Then there is their obsession with my appearance. You would think that, like Helen of Troy, I am planning to devastate the Labour Party with my looks, rather than what I have done for the last 20 years, which is pick it apart with my wits.

To my readers, it is irrelevant whether I am ugly, beautiful or boringly ordinary. What matters is whether I make sense and can string a decent argument together in an entertaining and informative way. I can do that from a wheelchair, with scars all over my face and a bald head.

Of course, I understand that this is all part of the general strategy to make me out as an evil witch. And witches, as we know from childhood fairy-tales, are ugly. But then here we go again, with the Labour Party undermining its own message of progressive modernity by revealing that it thinks in pre-Enlightenment terms (woman, ugly, witch, burn her) and believes its audience does likewise.

Do they have media supporters? They sure do!

As for Maltastar, the English-language face of the Labour Party, it just beggars belief. The amount of negative publicity it generates for Labour is unquantifiable, and I speak here as a professional and not as a PN voter/gONziPn SpINDokTir/friend of CHarLes CrROwFoDR …

Scathing polemic aside, this last passage is deftly put, and might be said about negative political writing in many countries:

They haven’t even managed to work out that I am a perfect fit with the voter profile they are so desperately keen to attract – which means that if they repeatedly miss their target with me, they miss it with thousands of others…

A lesson from Malta for our own British politicians as they scurry to and fro looking for votes.

Show integrity and a sense of unrelenting professionalism.

And be persuasive, not abusive.