It is remarkable that Adrian Delia tried to take credit for yesterday’s outcome. Let’s just measure the opportunity cost, right? It’s a big if to wonder what things might be if Simon Busuttil did not resign the leadership in 2017 so let’s not even speculate that far.

But we can, in our controlled intellectual experiment, remove Adrian Delia from the three wasted year he shat on and replace him with just about anyone with their heart approximately in the right place. Right now, the Nationalist Party would be banging election drums. It would be charging the government for complete moral bankruptcy. Just about everyone in the Labour Party parliamentary group, from the prime minister down, is compromised by photographs, quotes, applauses, votes and hugs proving more than an intimate association with an (alleged) corrupt, fraudster who is having a cold breakfast on a wooden bench right next to a bucket with his morning’s piss.

Robert Abela included.

The country is entitled to a clear alternative so that it can throw out the Labour Party and banish it either to a near impossible process of purification or collapse to give way instead to something that can replace it and serve the vocation of a progressive, public spirited political option.

Instead, the alternative is a compromised party that is going through that impossible process of purification, unable to find ways of washing away the blemishes of Adrian Delia’s conduct as party leader.

And it’s not just Adrian Delia. All those officials in the administrative committee of the party, its officials, the members of the parliamentary group and the executive who fulminated against Simon Busuttil and the “traitors” and the “rebels”: do you really expect to turn to us for applause now?

There’s only one way to reply to Adrian Delia’s self-praise: the way Helene, Daphne’s sister, handled Adrian Delia’s wreath when he showed up on a biċċa blogger’s memorial after she was blown up.

Fuck off, won’t you?