All these men moved from campaigning for Busuttil to campaigning actively for Delia

Here you have, photographed with Simon Busuttil on 3rd June, Pierre ‘Going Rate for a Russian’ Portelli, MZPN president Mark Grech, James Cassar and Joseph Grech.

And in the other photograph you have, photographed more recently with Adrian Delia, NET TV reporter Mario Frendo, Dione Borg, a Nationalist Party media old-timer and part of the building’s furniture, and the NET TV reporter who ran after Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, owner of Pilatus Bank, as he raced away from the bank with a couple of bags and an employee carrying more.

All seven of these men segued smoothly from working on Simon Busuttil’s electoral campaign to working on Adrian Delia’s campaign to replace him.

If they had the values – political values and values of integrity – that were required to understand what Busuttil was all about and what he was campaigning for, then they wouldn’t have been able to work for Delia. They are able to work for Delia now, and with such enthusiasm, because their real beliefs – if you can call them that – are closer to those of Delia than they are to those of Busuttil. And that means that they were the wrong people to work for Busuttil and the inevitable happened.

It is hard for the decent people who worked on that campaign to absorb the fact that they were surrounded by people who were not campaigning, as they themselves were, out of a sense of justice and what is right and proper, but instead because they wanted to win, and be part of a winning team, like at football.

And I hate to say it, but Going Rate Portelli doesn’t strike me as being at all bright or media savvy, besides his quite noticeable personality flaws, so what on earth was he going on a campaign team in a very difficult election, when only the brightest and the best are needed and everyone else is surplus to requirements because they are dead wood that gets in the way, if they are not actually collaborating with the enemy? And by that, I don’t necessarily mean the enemy in the Labour Party but the enemy at the Nationalist Party’s gate.

Let’s say these people made a real error of judgement when they opted to work for Delia, rather than a rational choice to nail their colours to a tosser’s mast for their own personal hoped-for benefit. But once Delia began to insult Simon Busuttil and other key players in the Nationalist Party, once he began to attack and hurl insults at the very organisation he is planning on leading, then they should have stepped firmly away and not gone back.

And that’s leaving aside the swirl of suspicious entanglements in which he operates, and his mountain of debt which he failed to tell them about. That’s what people of integrity do, out of self-respect if nothing else.

There’s another point I wish to make. Their socio-educational backgrounds may not have equipped these people to understand, let alone identify, the difference between real money and the big, hot talk and blather of a megalomaniac with a mountain of debt. But in their positions as journalists and political campaigners, they should most certainly have learned.