M’inhix sa nmerik Rene.

Le, l-avuket Joe Fenech ta’ Birkirkara kien ma’ Ugo u De Marco fil-guri ta’ Wied id-Dis.

I think that Fenech Adami roped in Guido as deputy leader and by doing so he got the support of all the party’s followers. Keeping one’s adversaries by one’s side, sort of. They used to work a lot together at the law courts. Together with Ugo they defended the accused in the Gharghur (Wied id-Dies) murder trial.

Blimey.

If I send you a copy of our police report would you publish it without revealing any names? We were advised by a police friend to “drop” the case for our own safety, and also because this poor police sergeant had a family of his own and was fully repentant, as if this stopped him slapping my wife in full view of our frightened kids.

[Daphne – Ah, but then I’d know your name, and apparently you don’t want that, do you? You go to great lengths to hide it.]

It seems that the only families they care about are their own. I have no personal vendetta against the police, having worked with the Maltese police force myself. I can vouch that one in 10 of them are law-abiding honest officers with no super-ego or sadistic tendencies. It’s only the other 90% who give a bad name to the honest ones. And unfortunately it seems that the very worst of the worst ones are crammed into the Spinola police station where they give vent to their frustration by taking it out on immigrants, drunken students and loud-mouthed tal-pepe housewives.

[Daphne – I can’t remember the last time I was a housewife. It must have been in 1987.]

So isn’t it about time the PN made the police force (largely) accountable?

[Daphne – It’s not gossip, Thomas. It’s fact. The difference is that De Marco was an astute politician who didn’t work to disrupt or destabilise his party out of personal bitterness. But the personal bitterness was nonetheless there, right up until the end. As late as the 1998 general election campaign, I watched members of his family come out in force on a balcony to watch him give the warm-up speech at a mass meeting, then pointedly go back inside and slam the doors shut for good measure just before Fenech Adami began to speak. They didn’t come out again.]

[Daphne – Did I say he did anything wrong? Let’s just say that the de Marco/Fenech Adami ‘I’ll never forgive you for becoming leader instead of me’ simmering feud was the forerunner of the Dalli/Gonzi one we are seeing now.]