Consider now the ultramontane alliance of crusading fanatics that is campaigning for Adrian Delia to stay because they believe he’s their best chance at forcing the PN to become a confessional, racist, Muslim-baiting, auto-flagellating cult.

This is Edwin Vassallo’s video response to my article about black-clad ideological extremism in the orbit of Adrian Delia.

He just ticks all the boxes of the stereotype Torquemada, doesn’t he? There’s the dog whistle accusation of Marxism which confuses my argument that politics should seek first to protect the weakest and the poorest with notions of dictatorship of the proletariat or the nationalisation of the means of production that are hardly up my street.

Another fool-proof test is the claim of the ideologue to be harking back to the origins of the party. He says the founders of the party wanted it to be Christian-Democrat which is of course a myth because the founders of the party were alive around 70 years before Christian-Democracy was invented and the PN took up Christian-Democracy thirty years after that.

The foundation mission of the party is now redundant: it was decolonisation and self-determination based on the distinctiveness of the Maltese from their British political masters. The distinctiveness was fundamentally cultural – Latini u Kattoliċi in the lingo of the time – in contrast with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants that ruled the roost here.

The 19th century nationalist program was fulfilled by independence. After that, the PN started systematically losing popular support until Eddie Fenech Adami and his young Turks, pushed Ġorġ Borg Olivier out and re-invented the party as a Christian-Democratic party with a clear European vocation. That was exhausted with European (and euro) membership. And the party is stuck again in a rut of nostalgia. Edwin Vassallo’s nostalgia.