In agreeing to ghost-write for Adrian Delia, for the reasons that I already gave for doing so, I helped in a small, likely irrelevant, way the person who I eventually came to think was not suited to be the leader of the party. I did not form an opinion on him before hearing him speak and that opinion got worse the more I heard.

It’s no excuse to say this happens to people. Daphne Caruana Galizia did not use it as an excuse when she wrote about how her first voting preference and her professional advice had gone to Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando: a man she would later learn is a whopping mad, lying charlatan if ever there was one.

I would have liked to have seen that future coming but I didn’t. I regret that.

In the interest of disclosure at the bottom of this post are links to the other articles I ghost-wrote for Adrian Delia during his leadership campaign in 2017. Some of them had poorly written introductions in the vindictive and divisive vein that would persist in his discourse added to my drafts.

Don’t speculate on what I, as ghost-writer, actually subscribe to or not in these articles. 

If you want to know what I think, there are 2,510 posts bearing my name on this blog. In there you can see what I think. In some cases you will find my thinking evolving. I changed my mind on a few things as I understood them better.

My thinking on Adrian Delia also evolved with time.

Pierre Portelli is managing to make this story personal. It is what you do when you have no way of countering rational arguments and you don’t mind discarding any shred of decency you may have been born with.

But I’m not the story. I’m a decoy.

The story is free journalism in this country, accountable governance, competent politics and in this specific case the ability and willingness of the Parliamentary opposition to remember who it’s supposed to oppose and what for.

I will try to tell that story as I have done for some months now. But my inability to tell it because of this childish noise coming out of One and Net, does not remove the need for someone to say it. And someone, somewhere will.