Adrian Delia should stop telling us what he thinks about the Nationalist Party and start telling us what he thinks about the government

If Adrian Delia and his faction get their way and he comes Opposition leader in September, it is the government he will have to fight. That is the whole point of having an Opposition under the Westminster system in parliament. It is one of the guarantees which citizens should have that the power of the government is not untrammelled.

But he has not yet told us what he thinks about the characters of Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi and other members of that crooked cabal. And I use the word ‘characters’ advisedly, because if the Nationalist Party is going to saddle itself with a ‘criticise the sin but not the sinner’ individual, then it might as well shut up shop.

There are such things as bad people, and the only way you can deal with them properly is by first identifying them for what they are.

I don’t think Adrian Delia is capable of doing that, because he wants to be liked. He has no desire, motivation or willingness to decimate his enemy. He doesn’t even acknowledge the concept of a political enemy, and prefers to dine out with them instead (metaphorically speaking or literally, as the case may be).

Yet he will have to contend with individuals who have adopted a scorched earth strategy towards the Nationalist Party and those who are even remotely suspected of supporting it. I have linked the definition of ‘scorched earth’ because people like Adrian Delia don’t understand that political tactics are essentially military tactics readopted to suit.

Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri are out hunting down and eliminating, or trying to eliminate, if they can’t co-opt, everyone they think could potentially stand in their way, trip them up, or do them damage. They have captured the institutions of state for this purpose, and show no embarrassment at all about it.

Yet Adrian Delia is talking about unity and refuses to say how he plans on fighting them. On the contrary, he plans not to fight them at all. The main thing I see missing there is martial spirit, which is exactly what is required in these terrible circumstances. If he thinks he is going to get the better of Labour politicians who have criminal intent and who are so driven that they will stop at nothing, by chatting to them over drinks and having lunch with them in the interests of “unity”, then the only way he can do it is by taking a tip from Lucrezia Borgia.

And before the uneducated in our midst – and I’m afraid that includes Dr Delia himself, who couldn’t stop himself carping about the false distinction between a ‘journalist’ and a ‘blogger’ – become agitated at the suspicion that I have suggests he poisons them: this falls into the category of ‘taken out and shot’.

At this point, I find myself lighting candles to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, for the appearance of a candidate, any candidate, who is even partially educated in the real sense of the word. The reason education is important is because information is power. The uneducated are at a complete loss in a debate with the educated. A debate between two uneducated party leaders just makes the rest of the country desperate.

“If I can run a football club in a Maltese town, then I can run the government of a European Union member state.”