“The Maltese are content with simple pleasures like going to the village square in the evening for a chat.”

The leader of the Nationalist Party said on the party’s radio station yesterday morning that he was “misunderstood” when he told LovinMalta that “the Maltese are simple people” who want nothing more than to go to work in the morning then come home and tinker about with their cars and their birds.

“What I meant is that the Maltese are content with simple pleasures like going to the village square in the evening for a chat,” he said on radio.

Oh, really? He tries to patch up his original gross error in which “the Maltese” = working-class men, and instead repeats it and underscores it. Because only working-class men, and more so those of a certain age, go to the village square in the evening for a chat. The working-class women are at home and everyone else is otherwise engaged.

So, is Adrian Delia one of those hung-up people who use “the Maltese” as a cipher for the H-word that dare not speak its name (it’s very common; you would be surprised), in which case he does not think of himself as Maltese? Or is he a different kind of “the Maltese”, one who is not content with simple pleasures like going to the village square for an evening chat, but prefers more complicated pleasures that have caused him to end up living off credit cards and bank overdrafts?

And then his sycophants call him a ‘man of the people’ – and indeed, like all cult leaders we know of from history, he lives in luxury on other people’s money – in this case, the banks, but it is probably only a matter of time before he begins living off donations from cult members – while training his worshippers to learn that he deserves it because he is special.

The neo-fascist leader who considers himself a cut above “the simple Maltese” with their “simple pleasures”.