Newly elected Nationalist MP Franco Debono complained to The Times earlier this week because it reported that he was likely to take Helen D'Amato's seat in the fifth district. The newspaper's "grave" mistake, according to the honourable member, was that it failed to mention that he had also managed to unseat PN stalwart Louis Galea.
Contacted for his comments yesterday, Dr Debono said he had not asked for an actual correction, but had just pointed out to the journalist that he was not precise.
"This is history," he said, "you were incorrect, not in my regard mostly, but in your readers'.
"So, now, because I insist on precision, and called courteously pointing out that you had a mistake, in turn I get a phone call from you... I didn't say anything, for instance, when you took the comments of all the other candidates and dedicated only one line to me while others got six lines, I didn't phone for that. I didn't phone because you took (Dr) Galea's comments twice on two days and (not those) of the elected MPs.
"I have huge respect for (Dr) Galea," he continued, "you cannot understand how much but... the fact is that I didn't take Helen D' Amato's seat, absolutely not, first of all for the sake of facts, and secondly... I had an almost impossible district if it interests you... I have huge, huge respect for (Dr) Galea, I cannot really explain but the fact that I succeeded in this, I think I deserve a bit of credit as well..."
Dr Debono was elected from the fifth district for the PN with 2,065 first-count votes. He managed to gain the seat usually taken by the highly respected Dr Galea, as a result of the surprising number of votes he managed to garner and the fact that the district's boundaries had changed.
The former education minister is usually elected from two districts and cedes his seat to Ms D'Amato. This time round, he failed to get elected in either district - so both MPs lost out.
With this in mind, the journalist reporting Dr Debono's unexpected triumph wrote that the young lawyer from the south had managed to outdo the former parliamentary secretary.
But Dr Debono called, stressing that he had eliminated Dr Galea too, just as messages of praise and tribute started flowing in for the man described as the co-architect of the Nationalist Party.
He insisted, in fact, that the race had been a difficult one for him and that he had put in a lot of effort, which included abandoning his law firm for three months and that the result was a consequence of that. Bruised but not bitter, Dr Galea had said he was serene about the result, joking that this would be his "new beginning". Perhaps, the young lawyer would have done well to inherit a bit of the graciousness along with his seat.