It must surprise no one, not even, if he could be honest with himself, Adrian Delia, that Adrian Delia’s big cheque for 500,000 euro for the Dar tal-Providenza bounced. I believe the technical term is dishonoured cheque, and how appropriate that adjective is.

I would say that the managers, volunteers and beneficiaries of the great work of the Dar tal-Providenza would be feeling disappointment now if I for a moment thought they had any expectation whatsoever they would see the money before they saw pigs fly.

If Adrian Delia had shown up with a check for 500 euro they’d have been doubtful. If it had been for 5,000 euro they’d have been wary. 50,000 and they would have avoided looking him in the eye. But nothing less than a national record for the man who wants us all to be disappointed he’s not going to run for prime minister in a few months’ time. The biggest pledged sum for charity in Maltese history turned out to be the biggest ever dud.

I hope his residual support base in what used to be the Nationalist Party is happy with this fresh hell this poor excuse for a politician has inflicted on his party. One would have thought the Nationalist Party could start the long road of reclaiming some semblance of credibility.

Bernard Grech speaks of his party being ready to take over the government. What? With this guy in your ranks? I wouldn’t trust a party that presents Adrian Delia as one of its own to organise a piss-up in a brewery. If I did, there would be no beer. Adrian Delia would have drunk it all before the guests start coming.

If you’re asking where the beer’s gone, ask Adrian Delia where the Nationalist Party’s money is. It goes like this. After the financially ruinous 2013 elections, the Nationalist Party restructured its finances. It became a smaller organisation that had to let go of some of its best people in order to survive. But before, during, and after the 2017 elections the party was paying its employees with the money it was collecting.

When Adrian Delia stepped in, a huge chunk of the donations dried up. Remember him screaming at the party “elite”, as he called them, that he wanted the party back from those who had “grasped” it? In steps Adrian Delia and those thousands of donors who gave a little every month to keep their party going no longer recognised the PN as something that represented them. The donations dried up. The Net TV audiences dried up because the adulatory following of a mediocre imbecile running an editorial agenda barely distinguishable from One TV’s makes for a very limited niche audience, so advertising revenue dried up as well.

Whom did Adrian Delia ask for money? Lovin Malta is quoting sources say that Pierre Portelli solicited money from Yorgen Fenech. Their sources are merely confirming what Keith Schembri has already said. Yorgen Fenech: the guy who was outed for owning 17 Black. While Jason Azzopardi, Karol Aquilina, David Casa and others stuck their necks out denouncing the corrupt relationship between Yorgen Fenech and the PL-politicians he bribed, Adrian Delia gets a bright idea. Who better to ask money from?

And let’s cut the crap and not start now, after all that’s been said and done, to distinguish between Pierre Portelli and Adrian Delia as if these weren’t joined at the hip.

You know what’s funny? The Nationalist Party never saw money from Yorgen Fenech. Whatever has been solicited from him, and from what we’ve heard so far, whatever Yorgen Fenech has paid out, did not make it to the Nationalist Party.

It’s not just corrupt, rotten and a betrayal of everything the Party stands for and what it should have been campaigning so strongly against: it’s a fraud, an embezzlement; the money vanished on the way to its ostensible destination.

When the country saw Adrian Delia holding up a cheque for 500,000 euro no one was thinking, what a great man he was. No one was moved to tears about the loss of a chance for this country to be governed by this clown. No one for a minute imagined that the 500,000 euro he promised were anything but a “ħadma” borne out of a mixture of addiction to attention, cold turkey, despair, and utterly, incomprehensibly, unjustified denial of reality.

Adrian Delia is not going to hide in shame. There must have been a hundred prior occasions he missed to do that before this one. Expect him now to attack the Dar tal-Providenza itself, blaming them, somehow, for the failure of the miracle he promised to materialise.

It’s never his fault, is it? When he ran the Nationalist Party’s polling to the ground and he had a lower approval rating than the over-charging village butcher who stuffs his sausages with fragrant coriander to cover the obnoxious stench of the unsold pork from three weeks ago, he blamed everyone but himself.

Then it was Jason Azzopardi’s fault; and Karol Aquilina’s; and David Casa’s; and several other “traitors”. And, of course, it was Simon Busuttil’s fault. You know Simon Busuttil, surely. He’s the guy who sits atop the conspiracy driven and orchestrated by the obscure establishment, an x-phile corporation, from which Adrian Delia promised to save us all. And it was also the fault of little old me who, if you were to believe Adrian Delia’s trolls on Facebook, somehow brought the party to its current state because I worked in Lawrence Gonzi’s government.

I would tell Adrian Delia to vanish into oblivion if I had any hope he would, just once, listen to some good advice. I would tell the PN the kick him out, if there was any universe where this Party would screw its courage in its sticking place and openly admit that for a brief eternity of 3 years it had been taken over by a scarecrow with makeup, applied, poorly, by Joseph Muscat.

So, instead, I’ll spare a thought for those hard-working women and men at the Dar tal-Providenza. I’m sorry this happened to you guys. You do great work and you didn’t need to be dragged into this quagmire of vomit, mud and shame. But this, sadly, is what our country has come to. These are our leaders. For some, they are the heroes of our time. Someone, somewhere, still thinks Adrian Delia is a misunderstood Messiah.

These are the politicians of our time: people without enough sense of restraint and proportion to ask themselves, if someone who says they are a Nigerian prince shows up with a paper cheque for 500,000 euro, how far they should be running.

How far should you be running from Adrian Delia? Why are you still here?