No, Mr Mercieca: only the secure and the self-assured can do what I do in such a hostile, dangerous climate

The eye surgeon Franco Mercieca, a Labour MP, has just been ranting and raving off a sheaf of notes in parliament, about “hate bloggers” – me, of course – because revealing what he and his fellow scoundrels try so hard to hide is “hate”.

Apparently, I am an “insecure person who hates myself and projects my feelings of insecurity onto others”. Read a brief bit here.

What a tosser – I mean, really, figuratively and probably also literally. And you’re going to have to forgive that crass term in this context because no other will fit.

Only the very secure and completely self-assured can do what I do in such a hostile and dangerous climate, and withstand such tsunamis of malice, gossip, poison-writing, venomous pot-stirring, constant invasion of my privacy, ill-wishing and deliberate sabotage for TWENTY-SIX YEARS.

I have stacks of box-files of newspaper cuttings from the early 1990s – back when I used to bother, at the start – with all the vile things that the Labour Party used to publish about me, the horrible cartoons, the nasty speculation, the vicious remarks. I was TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, and I had the self-belief, self-confidence and self-assurance to give everyone a reverse salute and keep right on going.

Very often, my worst enemies have been my supposed colleagues in the media – tall poppy syndrome, and all that. It didn’t stop me either. Those who know me know that I don’t give a rat’s bottom what other people think when I know I’m in the right. Other people’s opinion of me didn’t matter to me when I was 15, so how likely is it that it’s going to matter to me at 52?

The only opinions I care about are those of the people I respect personally, and whose views I value. They’re very few, and they most certainly don’t include Franco Mercieca, anybody in the Labour Party, or anyone who votes for such a corrupt truck-load of bollocks and horse-shit. And I make no excuses for my language.

Mercieca is an eye surgeon, not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. But you don’t have to be either of those things – simple common sense and understanding of human nature should tell him that you have to be pretty damn self-assured to be a Maltese woman of my generation, telling a bunch of men where to shove it on a daily basis, oblivious to the tidal waves of verbal violence, malice and threats coming her way from armies of malignant strangers and, more dangerously, from the malign Labour Party machine itself.

I have had my house set on fire twice, the first time when I was just 30, the second time a full-on conflagration involving jerry-cans of petrol and several truck-tyres packed with bottles of petrol, set against a row of glass doors leading to the bedrooms at 3am – not an arson attack, but attempted murder. And those Labour w*nkers think they’re going to stop me by howling about “hate blokkers”, calling me names and discussing the various aspects of my physical appearance.

I have been doing this for so long that my sons, now all aged 30 or thereabouts, know nothing else. One of them was in nappies when I started writing a newspaper column, the other two in kindergarten. They grew up thinking it was completely normal to have your mother’s name all over the newspapers and on the tip of politicians’ tongues, to have your house set on fire, to have police at your gate either to guard your mother or arrest her, to have her check the underside of the car for bombs before taking you to school, to answer the home telephone to find some anonymous nutjob spouting obscenities at you when you’re only eight years old, to find parcels of human excrement in the post, to see your mother ripped to shreds on Labour Party television, portrayed as a witch in Labour Party newspapers and gossiped about endlessly and viciously by people you know, and their parents, on Facebook.

Those who, like that poor Mintoffian sod Franco Mercieca – who earns millions cutting up people’s eyes, goes into business with that crook Joseph Portelli, but still wants to run the country from a seat in parliament – seem to think that what I do is easy, and that the only thing not stopping others doing the same is their “decency”, are obtuse and idiotic.

No, Mercieca, the only reason why – in almost three decades – there’s been nobody else doing what I do is simple: nobody else has the right combination of professional skills and guts, or the self-assurance to pull it off and keep at it despite being attacked in parliament on a regular basis by Mintoffian cowards like yourself. Where in the democratic world outside Donald Trump is it thought normal for politicians to use their power, parliamentary immunity and privilege to launch attacks on journalists who criticise them?

And now that Franco Mercieca has decided to go on the rampage in parliament, doing the very thing he claims to criticise by whipping up hatred against me, I have decided that I owe him nothing, and certainly no discretion. So listen up, readers, to something I wasn’t planning on revealing.

When the Panama Papers story broke and stopped the country in its tracks, Franco Mercieca made a point of expressing his disgust at the corruption, and he made a point of doing this within earshot of people connected to the Nationalist Party, deliberately, and several times. And those are just the times I know about.

Ever since then, he’s been ‘reaching out’ to people in the Nationalist Party, telling them how disgusted he is at government corruption, how revolting the situation is, but he is going to stand for election again because he feels he has to. Of course, those individuals in the Nationalist Party have lapped it up, thinking he’s taking them into his confidence and trusting them. But what he’s actually doing is – in typical Ghawdxi fashion – keeping the enemy on side so that while others in his party are criticised by the Opposition, he is not.

Do you want to know what my response was when somebody connected to the Nationalist Party said all this to me, as though Mercieca is a good man disillusioned by the corruption in his party, who is confiding his disillusionment in select members of the Opposition? It was this.

“He’s a f**king liar. If the lying bastard is so f**king disillusioned about the corruption of his twisted Prime Minister and colleagues, he’d resign his seat and go back to fiddling around with other people’s f**king eyes. It’s not like he needs to be a f**king member of parliament or do f**king politics. And not only is the bloody sleazy worm not resigning his seat, but he’s also planning to stand for election again, the lying c*nt.”

That conversation ended pretty quickly.

I have left the best for last. Franco Mercieca thinks the Prime Minister is the ultimate beneficial owner of Egrant Inc, the third company in Panama. Of course, he’s almost certainly right. And no doubt he’s talked it over with his business partner, Joseph Portelli, that highly suspicious shyster who’s planning on building a skyscraper on the old Telemalta compound in St Julian’s, and who is already taking cash for flats when the whole thing is still pie in the sky.

Be a man, Mercieca – tell parliament something that really matters. Not what you think about me, but what you think about the ownership of Egrant Inc.

Parlament mimli irġiel korrotti jew bla bajd jew it-tnejn. Qabda weirdos tar-raħal imnejkin minn ġuf ommhom, iffissati fil-flus qishom mejtin bil-ġuħ u se jdaħħluhom fit-tebut u jeħduhom magħhom. Such ugly, horrible, awful people – the worst possible combination of corruption, ignorance and avarice. They think it’s the morning-after pill and gay marriage which makes them progressive and liberal, backwoodsmen that they are. They’re not progressive and liberal. They’re amoral sociopaths, but try explaining the difference to people so deeply and profoundly uneducated.

The hate campaign which the Labour Party has unleashed afresh against me – a journalist, not a ‘hate blogger’ – because of this story is your greatest assurance that I’m right in what I report. If the story were untrue, Keith Schembri – or the Department of Information he controls – would simply have released a statement to put the record straight, I would have published a correction, and we would all have moved on. We would not be in this surreal position, with the Labour Party fighting and screaming but unable to even mention what it is they are fighting and screaming about.

Instead of issuing a statement laying out the information to contradict my story, they have set in motion a defensive attack designed to squash any attempts by others at picking up that story, and frightening other media into submission while casting doubt on my credibility and motives. Because in their Super One world, journalists need ‘motives’ for reporting the news that are not the simple wish to report the simple news. Well, here’s my message to them: GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. YOU’RE GOING TO NEED IT.

P.S. We have to examine the possibility that Franco Mercieca may have a company in the British Virgin Islands too, or a secret bank account in the Channel Islands or Switzerland. He can’t possibly be putting all those cash payments from his patients, for which he is not required to issue a receipt under the law because doctors have a special exemption, into Joseph Portelli’s real-estate developments. The money must be going somewhere else, because he’s certainly not putting it all in the bank at 0.5% and declaring every last cent to the taxman.