I don’t have copies of the articles I drafted for the signature of Adrian Delia during his campaign. But the ‘finished product’, as it were, is online.
I don’t overestimate the significance of the articles to the final outcome of that election perhaps because that helps me sleep at night. Somehow all those “issa l-Partit tagħna u morru tnejjku” brigade do not strike me as the type to read articles in newspapers and choose how to cast their votes on the back of what they understand to be the politician’s program.
I said yesterday that when I agreed to write these articles I was trusting Pierre Portelli’s judgement of his choice of candidate for PN leadership. Of course I would learn rather quickly that trust was misguided. It is the supreme benefit of hindsight that would now not let me follow his recommendation on what paper clips to buy, in case they turned around and bit me.
If I’m guilty of anything it’s that I gave Adrian Delia a fair shot at persuading me he was a suitable candidate. That’s quite the opposite of the narrative in the minds of trolls: that I resented the clean sweep he made of the generation that preceded him. Incidentally, what clean sweep? Jean Pierre Debono?
And the new ‘mercenary’ troll-mantra is really hollow considering that the big scandal is about work I did for free.
Free or not I wish I didn’t trust Pierre Portelli when he appealed to the beers we shared when we had hair on the top of our heads, not cultivated beards to cover our multiple chins.
But then I remind myself I never expected to be all knowing and all seeing. At least some people who voted for Adrian Delia at the leadership election — I didn’t — relied on the trust they had in Pierre Portelli and the others who recommended their unknown candidate to them. All we are left with is the comfort of our shared fallibility.
In the meantime I looked up the articles themselves that are still on the archives of timesofmalta.com. The word Panglossian in this first article I’m linking, I suppose, is a dead giveaway. There are a few others.
This one looks untouched. Some other drafts I prepared had a few opening lines about being the victim of “attacks”. The rest of the stuff is mine. If you’re regular to this blog, it should not surprise you.
When you’ve read them, ask yourself this: have you heard Adrian Delia say any of this stuff since his election or even anything like it? Perhaps now, over a year after he signed them, he might bother to read them for the first time.
Think about it. The brilliant Pierre Portelli has just told you that if ever Adrian Delia sounded like he might have some ideas about governing this country, that wasn’t actually him writing. It wasn’t actually him thinking either. It was this
Adrian Delia and Pierre Portelli. Pinky and the Brain.