I’m afraid she’s right. Mandy Mallia, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s sister, says what many of us where thinking at the sight of over-cooked pasta beads with tinned cocktail sausages. Well, one of the things we were thinking anyway. Mandy Mallia had the elegance not to comment about the food. I don’t. Whatever that was, it looked like a starving man’s nightmare and the accompanying verses were as elegant as the cocktail sausages. And the photo looks inspired from images of Hal 9000’s red eye, if murderous artificial intelligence could get an indigestion from thinking too hard.
But Mandy Mallia was being neither a literary nor a culinary critic. She was saying that the mindless drivel about mummy’s botched attempt at cooking is wasted on the Facebook page of the leader of opposition in a country where there is so much to oppose.
Almost 32,000 people follow Adrian Delia’s Facebook page. 29,000 of them “like” his page. His posts feature on their news feeds. It is really squandering that platform to be writing verses about what food he likes and that would be the case even if it was cooked by Raymond Blanc.
The man is a waste of space and energy. He will on occasion give a speech in Parliament that sounds impressive but that’s mostly because the rest of the chamber has politicians who appear to have got their training at the Nurse Ratched School of Public Speaking for the Terminally Insane. Adrian Delia would be like Jack Nicholson, looking relatively sane depending on which company he happens to be keeping.
The Times of Malta’s leader yesterday perceived improvements in the conduct of the PN. The perception is justified. But it has happened in spite of Adrian Delia, not because of him. His new crop of handlers are miles better than their predecessors but they’re at their wits end, trying to manage a toddler in a suit.
Decisions that depend on him are drawn out like blood eked out of rock. His attitude to the evidence coming out of court in the Daphne Caruana Galizia is at best ambivalent. Often distressingly worse. The timid statements about Chris Cardona and Keith Schembri are only very slightly more critical than things Robert Abela says about the same subject. They are clearly watered-down versions of drafts he’s given until he chokes them to irrelevance.
Right now, we should be waging a nationwide human rights battle. The government is increasingly authoritarian, crossing red lines like its life depended on it. Confidence in institutions is at an all-time low, the perception of widespread corruption is near universal and there isn’t even the excuse of a successful economy any more.
The PN announced the formation of working groups with fanfare akin to Kennedy’s state of the union speech saying he’ll put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. But he was announcing the restoration of a standard operational method he was the one to let fall into disuse. He did not announce his plan for governing the country after the next election. He announced he plans to have a plan. Yes, I know Labour said that already about him and I loathe to find they’re right about anything. It does not amuse me to hear them giggle.
Because this is the whole point of an opposition, isn’t it? That it instils in the public the notion that things can be better than having Robert Abela as prime minister, that there’s an alternative, another option, someone they could turn to.
If you’re into overcooked pasta with tinned sausages banned from baptism parties since 1983, you have much to look forward to.