No time for jubilation

When former PN star Nikki Dimech was sentenced to one year in prison for bribery, the Nationalist party issued a statement informed the whole world 'I told you so.'

I stood still for a moment and then I paused and then I thought, but was not Nikki Dimech once a star for the Nationalist party.

Here was someone who was once the prodigal son to PN MP Robert Arrigo and then later the Mayor of Sliema; the traditional national stronghold for the Nationalist party.

If the PN needed to issue a statement it should have read like this:

"We apologise for not having screened our candidates enough and chosen a candidate and allowed this to happen."

When Nikki Dimech was in politics and representing the PN everyone knew he had a drug problem and everyone knew what was going in the councils.  But it not only had to do with Dimech, everyone was in the soup.  Wonder of wonders, the PN simply looked the other way.

When he was indispensable his drug problem suddenly became an issue.

Do I feel sorry for Nikki Dimech?

Yes, I do.

Sorry, because no one in the Nationalist party had the gall, and this included the PM to turn round to him and tell him, that politics is not for you.

He was an excellent and qualified tax consultant and high-flyer and surely he did not need all this trouble.

That people make awful mistakes is abundantly clear.

He is appealing the sentence and until that appeal is heard we should give him the benefit of the doubt.

So all of sudden we are faced with a PN statement that kicks the ball back into the public domain.

It is quite surprising that the same approach is used for less salubrious figures in politics.

For example when it comes to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Franco Debono you get the impression that these two MP's just parachuted into the Nationalist party and were held at a gunpoint to become candidates for the PN.

They were not, they were stars for the PN and they were crucial in promoting Nationalist policies and more importantly bringing in the vote.

The Nikki Dimech saga shows us to what extent they consider us to be so naïve and ridiculous.