This uncomprehending retort of yours perfectly illustrates my point.

Would Saviour Balzan have asked for my help?

Would he have accepted it if offered?

Would he have worked alongside me or taken (professional) advice from me?

Well, then. There you have your answer as to one of the reasons why allowing Saviour Balzan to hijack the campaign for his glory was such a rotten idea.

Because it’s not just me. There are several people who would have worked for free on a professional public affairs campaign, but Saviour wasn’t sharing or he hated their guts.

maybe during next campaign you can offer to help with the campaign rather than bemoan the result afterwards .

The party structures and the advisors play a HUGE part in Busuttil’s behaviour, political strategy and tactics.

They obviously also determine his ideology and policy proposals.

The truth is the Nationalist Party is Maltese, and what lets them down is the Malteseness.

My view that Saviour Balzan was a disaster for the campaign has nothing to do with my dislike of him, though the reasons which made him disastrous also happen to be the reasons I dislike him.

Campaigns are not vehicles for personal axe-grinding and self-glorification. They are a means to a single goal. Anybody who stands in the way of the achievement of that goal should know enough to step aside whether he thinks it unfair or not.

Balzan’s goal was not victory for the No vote, but victory for the No vote with him acknowledged as the victor. The two are not the same goal. They are different goals entirely.

Saviour Balzan did not only hijack the campaign and turn his newspaper office into its ‘nerve-centre” (their description and not mine) but he also kept away the true professionals who would have made a difference – in marketing, science and conservation.

Balzan may know about birds, but he is a hopeless campaigner, and this recent disaster proved that unequivocally.

People have every right to be angry. They have been badly let down by a couple of arrogant know-it-alls who performed the amazing feat of making killing birds in the breeding season look sexier to voters than not killing them.

It was obvious that the hunters had more to lose personally which is why they made it a point to go out and vote. The ones who stayed home had nothing to gain personally.

So typical Maltese just like all the switchers who voted Labour only because they wanted something, a job, a contract, a tender, a permit and the list goes on.

We are a selfish lot.

I have ventured to do far, far more than merely lead a campaign “when everyone and everything was against” me.

To wit: 25 years of sticking my neck out in a newspaper column and eight years of writing this blog.

You are a foolish man, indeed.