Joseph Muscat lays traps because that is how he plays his games. But that doesn’t mean the PN will fall for them. It was a very disappointed prime minister yesterday who stood up to face an Opposition that proved to be not quite as gullible as he thought they would be. It is clear the [...]

Since 2013 I’ve been out of my original line of work – politics – and have done various jobs here and there trying to grow new feet in my dotage. For some time I taught history (under the contemporary guise of ‘European Studies’) in a secondary school. The experience was more rewarding for me than [...]

It is a month to the day since the last election and it feels like it could have been years.The ability of Joseph Muscat to determine and manipulate the national agenda has been proven less by his confirmation at the polls and more by how he has again managed to dip the PN’s tail in [...]

Precisely as Joseph Muscat intended it to be, the gender equality vote is proving to be a dusty hairball in the PN parliamentary group’s collective throat. This sort of thing tends to happen with weak leadership. Right now the PN is led by a lame duck with its guts flowing out of its mid-action seppuku. [...]

In 1986 the state accused an innocent man -- then of the same age I am now -- of the murder of another man he did not know. The first innocent man was framed by the police who planted the murder weapon in his farm because the police were protecting the real murderers. The real [...]

The field of candidates is starting to take shape.From within the parliamentary group, Chris Said has come forward and at least one other may be getting ready to step up. Claudio Grech keeps being mentioned, one should think not merely because of wishful thinking. From among the party officials, Alex Perici Calascione is publicly flirting [...]

I am not a lawyer, nor is one of my names Adrian, and this blog is not a coy bid at the leadership of the Nationalist Party. I started this blog because as an ex-journalist, ex-civil servant and ex-would be politician, it’s the only way I know how to let off steam.I have a cousin, [...]

Read this guest post by expert lawyer Justin Borg Barthet on the Marriage Equality Bill.While a silly debate between ayatollahs rages on, on whether the law should speak of mothers or birth-givers to avoid offence, the real issue most have not noticed is the pathetic poverty of the making of this law and many others. Otto [...]

This Guest Post is by Justin Borg Barthet, a lecturer in law at the University of Aberdeen. Dr Borg-Barthet has published work on cross-border recognition of same-sex relationships, and has been commissioned by the European Parliament to advise on the reform of divorce jurisdiction.Through the Marriage Equality Bill, Malta joins a small group of European nations [...]

Think of a barrel of whiskey with a corked hole at its bottom. It is water-tight and holds the whiskey inside, for years if it needs to. As long as the cork holds. That is its weakest point that may hold for decades or give at any moment and let all the whiskey gush out [...]

I had some friendly backlash to my piece yesterday on The Sunday Times. It surprised me, although perhaps it should not have.I was told on the one hand that I’m a hopeless idealist chasing unicorns and that the job requirements I listed for the job of PN leader were impossibly onerous and no one alive, [...]

We are searching for a new leader for the PN.Read about it in The Sunday Times today.

See my column on The Sunday Times tomorrow.

So fair and foul a phrase I have not heard.It’s a mantra repeated without fail but with much frustration by the party loyalists who will stick with the PN through thick and thin but who have a shared theory on why others would not. It’s that verb ‘qeda’ that is so loaded in the Maltese [...]

Political parties do not exist for their own sake. They are an enabling tool for the functioning of democracy. It helps to understand where they came from. Commons elected to Westminster were chosen, not for belonging to this or that party, but for being the favourite representative of their constituency.But in a chamber of hundreds, [...]

On election’s eve, Joseph Muscat, wanted to make sure the justified rumblings among employees and people who economically depend on the gaming industry changed nothing in the outcome he wanted out of the election. Not for him electoral loss because of the economic consequences of the corruption in his government.So he resorted to the simplest [...]

It’s been two weeks to the hour that this blog has been around. It was two nights after the election result and the first morning back to work and the old routine. Everything was the same again but everything was different. I’ve now been away from the local political scene for over 4 years. I [...]

When they had to choose between the obscurantist proto-communist puppets of Libya and western liberal democracy the first time voters of 1981 and 1987 did not have a tough choice. They are 48 to 58 now. When we had to choose between Europe and vaguely described, poorly argued shades of xenophobic isolationism, the choice for [...]

The Archbishop had to intervene to tell us hate speech is not such a great idea. He did so after Tony Zarb came back from his retirement to incite the lynching of David Casa and Roberta Metsola for doing a Fredo Corleone and taking sides against the family. Alfred Griscti then predictably branded the Archbishop [...]

The first electoral appointment for the newly re-configured PN, will be the European Parliament elections in 2019. Naturally incumbents, candidates and aspirants will probably already be thinking how they can position themselves to try to carve a space for themselves in the big blue chamber. It’s also by extension a significant position in the national [...]