As a member of the Nationalist Party’s electoral campaign team, how did Pierre Portelli handle the Chris Cardona Acapulco story?

Those who try to defend Pierre (Paul) Portelli by saying that when police caught him naked with a prostitute in an illegal Sliema brothel, it “was just a youthful escapade” are out on a limb that makes me wonder why they refuse to see the obvious.

He wasn’t 16 or 17. He was 22. At 22 I was married with two children, a household to run and a lorry-load of responsibilities. Had I failed to meet those responsibilities where the children were concerned, I would have had to face the law. Nobody would have said “U ejja, miskina, she’s only 22.”

A man of 22 is a man, not a teenager. He is old enough to marry, old enough to have children, and the law will hold him accountable if he fails in his obligations towards them.

When a man of 22 talks about “paying the going rate of Lm15” to insert his knob into a desperate woman trafficked from Eastern Europe and longing to go back home when she is instead forced to have sex with Maltese savages for peanuts by those who have taken her passport, then we are not talking about youth. We are talking about character.

By 22, you are supposed to know that the wrong-doing in going with a prostitute is not the violation of the Roman Catholic rule on sex outside marriage, but the violation of another person who has no choice but to accept your peanuts and then perform acts with you which are repulsive to her.

More to the point, a man of 22 living in Malta can have sex for free with other consenting adults, in a relationship or on a one-night-stand. Malta has a problem with promiscuity and not with straitlaced behaviour. So if a man of 22 chooses, instead of having sex on a date, to pay L15 (“the going rate”) to have sex with a trafficked woman, then that speaks volumes about his attitude to sex, women and the whole Madonna/whore thing that is so prevalent in Catholic societies. And that, too, is about character.

Why did I know instantly that it was him when I read the judgement of the Courts of Justice? Because his character fitted. Don’t ask me to pinpoint exactly what and how. The signals that tell me I can’t trust somebody are probably largely subconscious. In the past, I have ignored them at my peril. I no longer do so. When my mind signals ‘SHIFTY’ to me, now I take notice even if at a rational level I can’t work out why my mind is telling me that.

And why, when I found just two Pierre Paul Portellis on the electoral register, did I know instantly that it wasn’t the other one? Because his character doesn’t fit.

There’s another thing. Pierre (Paul) Portelli was a key member of the Nationalist Party’s electoral campaign team for the general election last June, and a party official. This while blaming everyone else for the defeat and calling others a liability. When the Chris Cardona story came up, how did he react to it? How did he handle it?

Did he poo-poo it as unimportant or say that I shouldn’t be believed and that I have no evidence? (Now we know why.) Or did he run with it, which would make him the worst kind of hypocrite?

Everything has to be framed in context. This is just one such example. And he still hasn’t told us whether he disclosed to the Nationalist Party the fact that he had been caught naked by police in a brothel and was a witness for the prosecution of the brothel manager.

The Nationalist Party now needs to tell us whether it would have accepted him on its ticket had it known, and whether it is going to strip him of that ticket on the Sliema local council now that it does know.

We shouldn’t bother asking whether Delia is going to keep him on as campaign manager, because the answer to that is obviously yes. Lying and brothels don’t bother him in the least. The brothel in question certainly bothered his in-laws, though, because his wife’s grandmother lived right next to it, and there is no way on earth that his wife can’t have known what was happening at the Berkeley Hotel or missed seeing Tony Aquilina there practically every day – unless she sails through life totally oblivious to what is happening around her.

Pierre Paul Portelli (right) with Adrian Delia on the campaign trail. The other man is fellow Sliema councillor John Pillow.