Marisa revisited (the Benoit remix)

It’s amazing what time can do but it’s just great sitting back and watching the ripple effect of Labour’s latest appointment. J’accuse would like to point its readers to Marie Benoit’s hilarious article penned in the aftermath of the 2004 Labour “electoral” victory. The article is called “the unbearable heaviness of being Marisa” (22nd June 2004) and Benoit, who makes no attempt to hide her labourite leanings takes pleasure at driving huge digs in the direction of Marisa and her (at the time) Monday column on the Independent.

Marisa was then still working as Chairman of the Housing Authority. Click on READ MORE  and you will find a few juicy clips from Benoit’s tirades (my subtitles).

Premonition?

Should the Chairman of the Housing Authority who serves people mainly from the lower echelons of society be allowed to write with such bias in newspapers? She seems to be simulteanously running a campaign for the Nationalists, Labour and now Alternattiva all at the same time.

More money, more problems

To Marisa the Nationalists are a moral crusade. She sees them as the self-proclaimed party of the nation and no one should ever take their place. And who can blame her? What would she do with herself if Alfred Sant came into power? No wonder she is ready to emerge at every election and referendum and almost every column in between with her sulphurous class prejudices, anti-Labour spiel and now anti-Alternattiva vindictive. She would like the Nats to have perpetual, untrammelled power. It was the Nats who put her there after all. But she is paid and chauffeured around by your taxes and mine and those of the ‘uneducated’ who vote Labour and whom she so despises.

The Shadow

Votes are votes. What Marisa really wants is not to be Chairman of the Housing Authority having to deal with the hoi polloi but to be Minister swanning around in a chauffeured car with frequent freebies abroad. She has no pedigree when it comes to the Nats. She can’t claim, like one other columnist, time and time again ad nauseum, how she was beaten up by Old Labour (now very much a declining force) and even spent one night locked up in a police station. She may have voted Labour in her years in Brixton but that does not give her the much needed common touch in politics.

And now Brussels…

Here’s another pearl of Marisa wisdom: “It will be a loss to this country if three excellent Nationalist reps don’t make it and we have three negative Labour reps instead.”  Your loss is our gain dear. I am delighted with Joseph Muscat, Louis Grech and John Attard Montalto, all three worthy representatives in Brussels. All three with excellent backgrounds. It is these candidates who are going to stand up strongly for our interests but especially the interests not of the elite but of the man in the street. So go on bleating into your Chardonnay Marisa.

The Cherry on the Cake

For the sake of the Nats, for the sake of our readers for my sake I hope her column on Mondays is but an Indian summer. There are enough columnists in English-language journalism who stoop to personal abuse that is ignorant, nasty, stomach-turning and brutal. I say give her, this woman with a mixture of obsessions, a desk at party headquarters and get her to address envelopes in the Nationalist cause. But perhaps Marisa has as yet to understand that ultimately what matters about human beings is not their politics but their goodness.

Well, Marisa  may have got her headquarters mixed up but she has finally got the desk. Who knows she may have discovered that there is “goodness” on the other side… in any case this story is really turning out to be one hell of a juicy issue – exposing the political tabula rasa on both sides of the sorry political divide.