Here’s a little something that people like Adrian Delia need to look at

Right now I’m getting messages from members of Adrian Delia’s rabble, saying – with no punctuation except a lot of exclamation marks at the end – that I’m finished, RIP, take a cyanide pill, and other remarks involving body parts which I have long been accustomed to from Labour supporters.

My stock response, where I bother, is: I have been writing for three decades and have out-survived five Prime Ministers and Opposition leaders. There is nobody in parliament today who was there when I began writing. I have out-survived the lot of them.

There were people telling me a lot worse in 1990 than they are now. Then, there was no Facebook, so they wrote to the editor instead. Almost every edition of The Sunday Times carried a page of letters from outraged citizens telling me where to shove my opinions and that with views like those I wouldn’t survive. Many of those people are now dead through natural causes, as are my worst and most vicious enemies in the political class.

I don’t enjoy speaking about these things because it sounds like showing off, and to people who weren’t raised like Delia, showing off is the ultimate pits. It is, however, sometimes necessary to record the facts and to set the matter straight. I don’t like giving away my view-figures, but I will make an exception for the last few days when I was supposed to be finished: 400,000+ views on a single day, 300,000+ views today alone, 321 million views since I began.

And that best-ever figure of 1.05 million views? Yes, that was in a single day. I forget the occasion, but it might have been when Mr Cardona, who resigned after the London brothel-company, of which he was a director with Mr Delia, was raided by the London police, popped into a brothel in Germany.

Journalists who don’t depend on the popular vote invariably and inevitably out-survive those who do. They serve their readers, and if they do it well, the results are like those below. It is not easy to keep a massive – for Malta – readership for three decades, with changing generations of readers, old ones dying off and new ones coming in.

It takes a very particular skill-set. Of course, the politicians have helped, because in 30 years the Labour Party has not stopped obsessing about me and mentioning my name in vain, and now I have additional publicity from Adrian Delia and his rabble, who incidentally include people of all social classes, but still rabble because they don’t think rationally.

This irrational thinking manifests itself in the belief that I can somehow be controlled by anyone or anything. The fact of the matter is that I set up this website for precisely the opposite reason: to be free of any form of control or interference. I didn’t have any in all these years, except once at The Sunday Times and once at The Malta Independent, but I like knowing that this is one space where absolutely nobody has any say in what I write or how I write it. And the view-figures speak for themselves: not at all bad for a “biċċa blogger”.

Please bear in mind that this is after years of concerted attempts by the entire Labour propaganda machine to mock me, ridicule me, harass me, sue me, and undermine my credibility in every way possible.

Adrian Delia and his friends in the Labour Party/PLPN need to note that I am not going anywhere until I decide to do so of my own volition for my own personal and private reasons, which is not on the horizon any time soon. Meanwhile, civilised and rational people who now feel that they have no political home to go to because corruption, insanity, proto-fascism and irrational thinking reign supreme in the new PLPN of Keith Schembri and Adrian Delia – there is a common factor in Phyllis Muscat but I will leave that for later – can flock here.

I promise to continue providing you with the oasis of sanity you want and need, as long as I am able to do so. And remember always that more and more people who are in the wrong do not become right by sheer force of numbers. We live among people for whom politics is not about political ideology but about winning, as with football. The price paid for living in a very unsophisticated society is a high one. Younger people may decide it’s not worth it, and we can’t blame them. They have many options and they don’t have to live in a place where the fate of the nation is decided in parliament by football fans and the corrupt.