Just a quick note for Joseph Muscat, Owen Bonnici, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Edward Scicluna, Chris Cardona, Ian Borg and so on.
You thought everyone would be too scared, too compromised, too blind to oppose you.
You thought you could control all outcomes.
And most of the time you were right. Many are scared, compromised or blind.
And though you behave sometimes like Thomases from an alternative reality, poking your hands through a sodding pothole and proclaiming it is not a pothole, reality has a habit of catching up with tyrants and revolving spinners.
We are not going to start under-estimating you now. We know this cave is dark and deep and that we’ll probably never know all that you’re up to.
Witnesses will walk the streets at night waiting for a piano to accidentally fall over their heads. Culprits will be driven by their uncles from luxury hotels to expensive rehab centres in Switzerland, the US and who knows where else, wondering it this could be their last ride.
In the meantime, you’ll make sure you don’t miss a flight to speak at the glitzy conferences of your citizenship-trafficking partners, to raise a glass or six at the kitsch weddings of your money-laundering and sanction-busting accomplices, to toast brother dictators and sail with your arriviste retailers who wear their refereeing whistles under the ambassador’s coat they wear at their own social calendar of Mafiosi vampires.
One other thing you should remember, that thing that nags you first thing in the morning when your eyes flicker open and when you nod off into your restless, haunted sleep.
At every turn we’ll be there: in court, in the streets, lobbying international institutions, speaking to the press of the world, explaining to your victims that they can actually do something else rather than whimper while you fuck them over.
I know how badly you wish us to give up.
But as my daughter tells me when charm is not enough, sometimes you’ve got to be a little bit naughty.
Put up with that.