All those warped men need to take their pathological obsession with me to the nearest psychiatrist

Franco Mercieca, the eye surgeon who is a Labour MP and for a time a member of Muscat’s cabinet – he stepped down because he wanted to have his cake and eat it as a practising eye surgeon and member of the cabinet, and couldn’t – stood up in parliament yesterday to squawk in outrage.

Did he squawk in outrage about the behaviour of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who was serendipitously (though not for him) discovered to have begun setting up a company in Panama and trust in New Zealand just days after coming to power in March 2013? Did Mercieca squawk about the fact that he did this in league with a cabinet minister, Konrad Mizzi, and a third person who we all suspect has got to be the Prime Minister himself or the deputy Prime Minister, Louis Grech?

No, of course not. The good and respectable eye surgeon and politician of integrity squawked instead about the fact that I reported on Schembri’s serious illness, the cause of his absence from the office for several months. I did, in other words, what the Office of the Prime Minister was in duty bound to do, through – as it happens – a statement from his doctor, the very same Mercieca, but failed to do because it believes that secrets should be kept from the electorate.

Franco Mercieca can squawk and squeal all he likes, but the fact remains that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled very clearly on the matter: the serious illness of those in power over the electorate is a matter of public interest. Not only may it be reported, but it should be reported, because the public must not be kept in the dark about such matters.

When Alfred Sant, then the Opposition leader about to fight an election campaign, was diagnosed with cancer and had to be operated on, he did not hide away like Louis Grech and Keith Schembri, keeping secrets from the public. He briefed his surgeon – then also, as it happens, a Labour MP, Anthony Zammit – to call a press conference and give the press all the details. That’s how it should be done.

On the other side of the political fence, that is what the two deputy leaders of the Opposition have done too, only in their case they explained matters to the public themselves, rather than getting their doctors to do it.

The context of Franco Mercieca’s deranged assault on me in parliament last night was the debate about the Media and Defamation Bill, which many people view as being conceived in several parts to target me. Whether this is correct or not is almost irrelevant, because members of the government and those who support it are doing nothing to dismiss the perception. On the contrary, they are going out of their way to heighten it.

The promoter of the bill, the Minister for Justice and Culture aka the Minister for Janice, never misses an opportunity to preach, in that priestly monotone of his, against the evils of independent journalism as practised by a woman they can’t control. Bonnici, too, ranted and raved in parliament about the subject, only in his case, he wasn’t cross because I wrote about his patient. He was cross because I wrote about his girlfriend, who isn’t merely his girlfriend but the Labour Party TV reporter for whom he left his wife and child – which is entirely different, of course, but he doesn’t see it that way.

Mercieca didn’t help the perception that the government/Labour Party is out to get me in any way it can when he said in parliament that the maximum damages for libel should be increased to far more than the €20,000 which the bill envisages, “as a means to prevent that woman from publishing false and damaging stories”. Do these people understand what they sound like to those who were not raised in a tight Maltese village bubble? They sound quite mad.

And it really doesn’t help that they are all men of a certain kind, fixating on a woman who isn’t. They sound like a tribunal of 17th-century village elders raging against, and calling for the torture and execution of, a woman in the village who stands outside their social control and who must therefore be classified as a witch who casts spells over others and must be stopped or destroyed, so that they can get back to controlling the situation again.

They may have got away with that 300 or 400 years ago, but now they just sound like they need to go and see the nearest psychiatrist as quickly as possible. What makes their behaviour madder still, in a worrying way for the country which shouldn’t be run by disturbed people, is that the outfit called the Labour Party has been at it, in my regard, for almost 30 years, since I was 25 in 1990.

Yes, that’s right: they’ve been calling for my destruction for three decades. How sick is that? How pathologically obsessed? There’s obviously something very wrong with them that goes beyond politics.

As for me, I haven’t much to say about Franco Mercieca except that if I need my eyes seen to, I certainly won’t be going to him because based on what he said last night, the hatred he manifested, he will probably blind me and solve by that expedient the Labour Party’s problems with my writing. I would be insane to place myself as a patient in the hands of somebody who clearly hates me so much, and he is out of his mind, as a surgeon, to speak the way he does.

The only thing I wish to say at this stage is that the only time I ever saw him in real life was a couple of months ago when I stood waiting for one of my sons to come out of Arrivals at the airport. The flight was delayed and instead of my son Franco Mercieca walked out, and came face to face with me. I had seen him before he saw me, and had positioned myself to stare him down.

The hero, who was so brave last night in parliament insulting me and raging against me from behind that wall of safety and lawful privilege, looked as though he had seen a ghost, dropped his eyes, twisted his mouth in embarrassment, put his head down and scuttled awkwardly off towards his welcoming party, a large number of them who behaved as though they hadn’t seen him for a year at least.

As he scuttled off, I made the rather astonishing discovery that he is shockingly small except for his truly impressive child-bearing hips and mature lady’s bottom, which are actually topped by a waist. I am not in the least bit embarrassed to say that I was transfixed: it was as though I had seen our old school matron in a pair of tight ladies’ jeans. Except that he is a man and can’t wear heels to mitigate the disaster of a Mediterranean lady’s rump coupled with legs that are about two feet short.

Gosh, I said to myself, no wonder he only ever lets us see photographs of his big blue eyes. And if that sounds like a miaow moment, believe me, it is. The man looks totally ridiculous in real life. No wonder he’s so comfortable around the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

Franco Mercieca (right) with the Prime Minister