His Own Idea, He Said.

Glenn Bedingfield would like us to believe that the blog he ran before Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered was his idea, not Labour’s. He had said it before, under oath at the public inquiry: it was his “personal initiative”.

And what bloody difference does that make, even if it true?

He was a Labour politician, working at the Office of the Prime Minister for part of the blog’s life, during working hours, writing about people who criticised a Labour government. Whether somebody at Castille gave him instructions, nodded approvingly over coffee, or simply enjoyed the results is an interesting question.

It is not the only question.

The more obvious one is why a man close to power thought that publishing petty details about its critics was a worthwhile use of his time. My car registration number, for instance. There it was, along with other bits of personal trivia apparently thought suitable for public consumption. I cannot say I lost any sleep wondering what Bedingfield might do with knowledge available to anyone standing in a car park.

The point was that he wanted me to know he had noticed. That was the grubby little purpose of this stuff. Look at Boċċa. Look where he goes. Look what he drives. It had nothing to do with answering an argument. It tells the audience that the critic, rather than the criticism, is now the story.

Mine was a trivial and meaningless experience. With Daphne, the treatment was far more sustained and far more vicious. At the Inquiry, it was put to Bedingfield that hundreds of his posts carried her name in the headline. He defended the onslaught as an “equal and opposite reaction”. Asked about publishing a photograph of her car with its number plate visible, he said it was a warning to people to be careful, not a warning to her.

Well, that clears that up, doesn’t it?

Daphne investigated people exercising power and the use they made of it. Bedingfield used his platform to make her an object of ridicule and suspicion. He is entitled to say that he acted on his own initiative. He is also liable to be judged for what he chose to do with it.

And let us be clear about something else.

Saying that his campaign was vile is not saying that Bedingfield ordered Daphne’s murder, or that every fool who wrote something nasty about her bears criminal responsibility for it. Those would be serious allegations requiring evidence and they are not being, and have never been, made.

It is not an allegation, however, but a statement of fact that not only was the campaign vile but also its instigator and all those who then, and now, continue to espouse its method.

To be sure, it was not a phenomenon extant only during the scummy Muscat years. Consider ONE TV and its hangers-on today, when somebody has written something critical of Labour. I feature there regularly enough to speak from experience, though the attention is not even mildly intimidating. Mostly it is tedious, occasionally funny, but it is revealing every time.

Watch how readily a criticism of a government decision becomes a discussion about the person who made it: his motives, his affiliations, his supposedly obsessive hostility. It is the old Bedingfield habit with a studio and better lighting.  It is attempted intimidation, pure and simple, trying to shut us up and leave space only for Robert Abela’s smirking faux optimism.

Bedingfield’s defence rests on a distinction between a party operation and a personal hobby. Gafa’, Stagno Navarra, Jason Micallef and Ricky Caruana, to mention some of the less edifying specimens, no doubt have the same plea to make.

Labour politicians spew beautiful words about press freedom at commemorations, trying to make us beleive that they honour journalists. The acid test comes on an ordinary Tuesday, when a journalist has published something that shows them to be less worthy of our undying adulation.

Then you will see little honour but plenty of vomit.