Delia tells audience: “I am proud to be a normal and humble person.”

Adrian Delia said yesterday evening in Marsaxlokk that he is “proud to be a normal and humble Maltese person”.

Normal and humble? Normal and humble people do not pay many thousands of euros a year to keep five children at San Anton School. They do not get driven around by a full-time chauffeur in a large BMW. They do not have a full-time housekeeper and also a wife who doesn’t work and so doesn’t, strictly speaking, need one.

Normal and humble people do not run up personal household debts of €780,000 with three separate banks. Nor do they arrogantly start out in development in their 30s by buying a hotel, demolishing it, building flats, failing catastrophically and wind up owing €7.2 million for 11 years, following which the bank forces them to sign a deed of constitution of debt making them personally liable as surety.

Normal and humble people do not set up bank accounts in offshore tax havens to launder money for a prostitution racket. And above all, normal and humble people do not wake up one morning and decide, with no prior experience or interest in politics, that they are going to aim straight for the top at the age of 50 and make themselves party leader out of nowhere.

No. Normal and humble people do none of those things. Normal and humble people are watching him aghast.