A New Way: Adrian Delia turns up to the TV studio surrounded entirely by a mob of heavies and shifty-looking characters

Watch the news video here. You will notice what’s wrong with it immediately. Adrian Delia has turned up to the Net TV studios surrounded tightly by a mob made up entirely of the kind of man you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, heavies and shifty-looking characters.

This is why he is supposed to be on a PR binge to convince us that he has nothing to do with characters like Mark Barbara, Chris Cardona, Maltese crime syndicates in Soho, or any kinds of Maltin ta’ Londra and other bad characters.

Apart from the terrible public relations – which is what happens from you get your political advice from Birkirkara FC – this is not a New Way at all. This is a very old way. This is a way I remember from the 1980s, when Wistin Abela, one of Mintoff’s cabinet ministers, turned up to open the new Holiday Inn in Sliema – I was there, as editor of The Circle magazine (time certainly flies, more than three decades of it) – surrounded by a mob of heavies and ugly characters wearing red T-shirts with his name on them.

While the guests in our suits and long dresses – because in those days you dressed up for an occasion like that – stood to listen to the speeches delivered by the big cheeses from Holiday Inn, the mob of heavies crowded round Wistin Abela in exactly the same way they are crowding around Adrian Delia here. It was a third-world situation.

Had I been advising Dr Delia, I would have told him to turn up at the television studios accompanied by nobody other than his wife and a single aide, preferably a youngish man to counter-balance the effect of the wife, a civilised and efficient-looking youngish man and not one who looks like a thug, wearing a smart blue suit and carrying a neat folder of notes.

But I can’t be the only one to have noticed that Adrian Delia seems to have thrown his wife overboard in this campaign. She has not been seen once. She is nowhere – not on his walkabouts, not when he makes himself present at village feasts, not even when he goes to speak at party clubs. Instead of being accompanied by his wife, he is accompanied everywhere by village thugs and gutter heavies. His wife is infinitely more presentable and by far the better option, but clearly, that is not the message he wants to send out. The message he wants to send out is: here comes Scarface. This is his real milieu.

Meanwhile, instinct tells me that we need to know who the heavy in the black shirt is, who is hugging so close to Dr Delia. He looks to me to be somebody we should know about. If any of my readers knows who he is, given that communication between this particular journalist and this particular leadership contender has broken down completely, I would be grateful if you would WhatsApp me on 99493545. I think he is called Censu L-Iswed.

Incidentally, I thought the gambling advert was a little tactless in the circumstances, but you can’t really control these things.