Adrian Delia sat to record a radio interview with Andrew Azzopardi yesterday. It was broadcast earlier today.
This is not an easy time for the PN leader though you would not think that from his tone on the interview today. He sounds as supremely confident as ever.
I will not review the interview. As he likes to say whenever argument runs aground, ‘the people will decide’.
I would like instead to just highlight a few particularly significant extracts.
Less than 24 hours after Daphne Caruana Galizia was buried, Adrian Delia spoke of his own assassination.
Why is it that the political leaders in Malta of the present generation insist on being so self-absorbed?
He sounds like the husband who asks the midwife to get him painkillers because the wheelchair carrying his screaming, parturient wife rolled over his feet.
If that sounds like inappropriate humour, it’s because it is.
As is inappropriate for the leader of the opposition to express greater concern about the impact on him of a journalist’s assassination than the impact on her and hers. Whatever you might think about any character assassination he may have suffered when the journalist was still alive, this morning he committed character suicide when he demonstrated once again he is unable to rise above it.
To use the figure of speech of ‘character assassination’ as perpetrated on oneself by a person who has been eliminated from the face of the earth in a literal ‘assassination’ demonstrates a pathetic lack of even the most basic emotional intelligence.
It also burns in flames, since we’re indulging in inappropriate metaphors, the self-referential claim by Adrian Delia that he so regrets having spoken about Daphne Caruana Galizia the way he did when she was alive.
Because if we’re meant to believe he regrets it because he did not mean it and did not have time to take it back, how then are we to take the consistent line that “Daphne Caruana Galizia did not investigate. She alleged.” And, of course that she “attempted to assassinate” his character.
Quite apart from the fact that she did nothing of the sort. What’s at issue now is not the correctness or otherwise of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s reporting. What’s at issue here is the basic sincerity of Adrian Delia.
Sincerity cannot be gleaned from the fine nuances of lawyer-speak.
Consider for example how Adrian Delia defends himself today from the self-evident fact he has had to admit that even now as you read this his taxes from years ago are still not paid. His defense, such as it is, is that his unpaid taxes are from a time when he was still a private person. Yes, and? Are we now to assume that it is the official policy of the PN that private persons are no longer obliged to pay their taxes on time?
It gets worse. Believe me. He continues to complain that because of the late payments he is going to have to pay interest which he finds charged at unfair rates and intends to revise them when in power.
The last person I heard arguing this way was Silvio Berlusconi. What do you say to a politician who goes on radio effectively admitting he is in politics in order to reduce penalties on tax dodgers, like, by his own admission, himself.
When you hear that you’d have to nod at Daphne Caruana Galizia’s sister’s Facebook post from earlier today. For Daphne Caruana Galizia to have even attempted to assassinate Adrian Delia’s character, he would have had to have had one in the first place.
Adrian Delia joins the self-absorbed men led by Joseph Muscat who have dealt with the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia as a rapist would deal with his accuser: it’s her fault. I could not control myself and could not have been reasonably expected to control myself.