UPDATED/Salvu Mallia speaks to people. Let him speak.

UPDATE/The president of the Nationalist Party’s executive council, Ann Fenech, has rung me to say that the party has “absolutely no intention” of letting Salvu Mallia go, or asking him to tone down his way of speaking and writing. “The way he speaks shows how angry he is at the Labour government. We’re certainly not discussing doing anything about it. Of course not. If people spoke to the Times of Malta, then it was certainly nobody who is in a position to decide about these matters.”

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The Nationalist Party is gearing up to shoot itself in the foot again. Not content with giving the corrupt government and Labour Party a significant victory by obligingly taking David Thake and his highly effective, big-audience show off the air on its radio station, they are now set to do the same with Salvu Mallia, another electoral candidate with the innate gift, or skill, that practically the whole of the Nationalist Party so conspicuously lacks: the ability to speak directly to people and chime with them; the willingness and ability to be direct and use sharp language, to put clear thoughts into concise words.

Back when the Panama Papers story broke across the world, Salvu Mallia was the first to say publicly – other than me, that is, but I don’t count for this and many other purposes – that if the Prime Minister’s two closest henchmen are corrupt, then it stands to reason that he is corrupt too.

He used a metaphor (I never do) because people soaked in Maltese culture love metaphors of that nature and because he was still hosting a show on Television Malta. And also because, I imagine, he didn’t want himself hit by a major libel suit in those early days before it became transparently obvious that they are in it up to their necks.

Almost a year down the line, when the Prime Minister has shown his reluctance to boot out Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, but defends them and praises them instead, it will be impossible for him to successfully sue anyone who says that he is involved in their corruption.

Salvu Mallia was not an electoral candidate back then. In fact, he first said that he would stand for election with Marlene Farrugia and her Democratic Party. I wrote a piece saying that this would work in the Labour Party’s favour and not against it, by splitting the anti-Muscat vote, and that if he really wants to help boot that corrupt bunch out of office, he has to throw his weight behind the only people who are in a position to do it electorally – the Nationalists.

You don’t have to be nuts about the Nationalists to vote for them (I don’t know anybody who is, because they don’t tend to provoke that kind of level of emotion) but if you detest the level of corruption, cronyism and smash-and-grab criminal opportunism that’s going on now, and the dangerous undermining of Malta’s institutions, that’s what you need to do.

I don’t know whether this influenced Mallia or at least set him thinking – he may have arrived at the same conclusion without having read what I wrote at all – but he did join the Nationalist Party and begin campaigning as an electoral candidate.

He’s brash, direct, completely irreverent and has that Five-Star-Movement-Beppe-Grillo anti-Establishment appeal that is so very much of the moment. But beyond that it was such a relief to hear a Nationalist politician laughing contemptuously and publicly at the lies, sordid posturing, avariciousness and criminal evasiveness of the government and its top politicians, and telling them where to stuff it in no uncertain terms.

He is a shock to many within the Nationalist Party’s various structures, though – the very same ones who were determined to get David Thake off the air because they don’t understand how he communicates, or who he communicates with (the very people they don’t reach, the ones who find the Nationalist Party tedious, boring, humourless, lacking in wit, prim and proper).

The Nationalist Party will, of course, insist on following Labour’s agenda. The Labour Party and the government it forms unleash a relentless barrage of insults against Thake, even dragging one of his daughters into it, and instead of kicking up one hell of an angry fuss about their behaviour, the Nationalists think “Hmmm, people are getting angry about him. Perhaps we’d better remove him.”

Now Labour is going for Salvu Mallia’s jugular, and instead of fighting back and telling them where to shove their carping, complaints, abuse and insults, the Nationalists behave as though they are being bullied in the locker-room and cave in immediately: “Here, have my lunch-money. And please take my new shoes and my iPhone as well.”

It’s maddening. The Nationalist Party is unable or unwilling to see that the only reason the Labour Party doesn’t launch similar assaults on others among its candidates or MPs is precisely because they are not afraid of them. The Labour Party is afraid of David Thake and afraid of Salvu Mallia, and so the Nationalist Party is going to oblige them by removing their loud voice from the equation.