Spin doctor Alastair Campbell recently organized a cozy get-together in Amsterdam, including his former boss and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and discredited UK politician Denis MacShane, which led to several European media outlets “suddenly” heaping pre-fab praise on Rama from their op-ed pages.
However, it seems that Campbell, who loves to sell out his lack of dignity to whomever pays his holiday, also is willing to dish out praise for the lesser gods of the Albanian Socialist pantheon.
In a meeting with FRESSh, the youth movement of the Socialist Party, in Jala last month, Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj made the following remark:
After not being in Tirana for 10 months, the councilor of Tony Blair said: “I have never seen in the world such speed [in construction] and a space that is filled with so much life. Trafalgar Square or main squares in London never have this!”
Apart from the fact that this conversation is probably a figment of Veliaj’s wild imagination, does he really think that Trafalgar Square, where thousands of citizens and tourists visit every day, compares badly with his concrete wasteland dumped in the middle city, where the fountains puke their unfiltered water over the uncoated stone tiles from “all around Albania,” which has already destroyed their color and is rapidly forming the white, grey, and brown mineral accretions that are usually only found in public urinals?
And does his real or imaginary “councilor” friend really think that the “speed” with which Skënderbeg Square has been built has nothing to do with the enormous corruption that surrounded the public procurement procedures, the last-minute additions, and the lack of any real architectural planning?
And are there lights on Trafalgar Square, Alastair Campbell? I think so!
