‘Caruana Galizia not universally admired’, Bedingfield tells Guardian newspaper

Labour MP Glenn Bedingfield has likened the slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia to the English poison-pen columnist Katie Hopkins, in answers he sent to questions from the Guardian newspaper.

He published the answers on his personal blog, after claiming the questions sent to him were “clearly worded” to damage him, citing complaints from Caruana Galizia’s family about blogs he wrote about the journalist.

Bedingfield said the questions illustrate “just how little understanding there is about the way Daphne Caruana Galizia operated and what her agenda was” and that the Guardian was unaware that “everyone in Malta knows it was she who did the hounding and then tried to play the victim when exasperated individuals hit back.”

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The questions from the UK newspaper ask Bedingfield, a former aide to the Prime Minister, about his blogs on Caruana Galizia, describing his posts as attacks funded by taxpayers’ money.

“Allow me to use a British example to answer this. If the targets of Katie Hopkins in the UK were highly critical of her would you call these ‘personal attacks against a single individual’?” Bedingfield asked, taking the opportunity to paint a different picture of the journalist’s anti-Labour agenda and less salubrious incursions in her personal blog.

“Daphne Caruana Galizia was not universally admired in Malta. Far from it. She was more of a political commentator than a journalist, with her own agenda. She freely expressed how much she despised the Labour Party and this is demonstrated by her long record of denigrating Labour politicians including their families and supporters,” Bedingfield told The Guardian.

“She used her blog on the net to target and hound individuals. She was at her absolute worse in the way she demeaned women, being highly critical of their weight, appearance and choice of clothes. Everybody in Malta deplored the terrible way she died but that doesn’t mean they condoned her callous writings.

“Daphne Carauna Galizia indulged in behaviour that no self-respecting journalist in Malta would.”

The MP also said Caruana Galizia never wrote about “her own failure to pay taxes” referring to the tax audit drawn up against her in 2014 into unpaid VAT for adverts published in her magazine business.

Bedingfield was charged with having encouraged readers to take snaps of Caruana Galizia while out in public, but he replied that the journalist “hounded” individuals by posting photos of Labour exponents and their families “wherever we went, even on holiday”.

“Because of the way she hounded individuals there was an element of me giving her a taste of her own medicine when I copied her tactic by publishing photos of her going about her daily business.”

Caruana Galizia’s family has complained that encouraging photography of the journalist was meant at intimidating and harassing her. Bedingfield told The Guardian that Caruana Galizia employed the same tactic and that people feared speaking to politicians during social activities “for fear they would be the next target of Daphne Carauna Galizia and her trolls.”

According to the questions posted in Bedingfield’s blog, the Guardian also suggested that the Labour administration was protecting whoever ordered the murder of Caruana Galizia, and pressuring police not to investigate this matter.

“The investigation into her killing is ongoing but three people have already been charged with murder. Police enlisted help from foreign agencies to assist in the investigation, including the FBI and Dutch forensic scientists. There is a €1 million reward to whoever comes forward with information. Do you deem this as protection to whoever ordered the murder?” Bedingfield said.