While Vince Farrugia was being medicated at Mater Dei on Thursday afternoon, he was told he needed five or six stitches applied to his face. At that moment, Vince cracked a joke. "Now they are going to say that I needed one, two, three, four, five stitches," he said. He was parodying his own quip at a PN conference prior to the European Parliament elections. With all the work the PN had done in the EU, he had said, the party deserved to elect five MEPs.

I greatly admire men and women who smile at acute adversity. It is a sign of strength, courage and character. Although not quite my favourite US President, I was in awe when Ronald Reagan, moments after he was shot, turned to his wife Nancy and in true Wild West form said: "Sorry honey, I forgot to duck."

In the same vein, there is another character-revealing moment embedded forever in my memory. In 1996, I was standing next to Eddie Fenech Adami as it became clear that the PN had lost the election. Surrounded by floor-level dejected faces, he calmly rose from his chair and turned to us with a genuinely benign grin. "Keep smiling," he said, fresh as a daisy, "I'm off to the President's office to concede defeat". A principled man had reached into his political soul and clear-headedly read one word: duty.

If upright men and women respond to acute difficulty with humour or ease, those who are uncertain of themselves and their principles react in a diametrically opposite way. They become sombre, rather hollow and contradictory. That is exactly how the Labour Party's response to the attack on Vince Farrugia sounded like. For two reasons.

First, the PL condemned the violence which resulted in six stitches on Farrugia's face and further damage to his body. Although commonplace, this Maltese knee- jerk reaction is massively irritating.

In a European democracy, violence does not need condemnation because it is dealt with adequately and conclusively by the law. Violence is no longer up for debate and does not need politicians blathering on about it. What needs to be condemned are its perpetrators, its motivation and its source. Now that would require political courage, particularly in this case. Alas that is precisely the virtue which the PL did not demonstrate with respect to the six stitches on Farrugia's face.

Secondly, the veil hiding the PL's lack of conviction and clear headedness was dropped in a flash by its own media reports on the attack. One TV failed to show any footage of Sandro Chetcuti. They had plenty of footage of the man to hand as he has been quite a frequent guest of their discussion programmes. So why did they hide him from their viewers? Why is Joseph Muscat refusing to be seen as if he is using his media machine to break Chetcuti's fall from grace?

Yet Muscat's station did worse: it failed to inform its viewers about the misfired SMS - which Chetcuti meant for Muscat but parked in Farrugia's mobile by mistake. According to The Times (March 12) it was this which "sparked" the incident. What are we to make of the PL's station act of hiding the SMS? Again, why is Muscat taking the crazy political risk of looking as if he needs protection? Here we have moved onto even trickier political ground, the sort of ground on which men of principle stand up to be counted.

L-Orizzont, the GWU's newspaper but in effect the PL's daily, showed even more enthusiasm for hiding facts and political spinning. In a front page story, it referred to Chetcuti as "l-aggressur" or a 38-year-old man from Marsascala. Not once, in the original report did it mention him by name. And obviously there was no picture of the man to be seen. It even hilariously referred to Chetcuti as an "allegat agressur" (alleged aggressor) when it was he who turned himself over to the police.

Finally, in a gesture lifted from a Soviet propaganda manual, Tony Zarb's newspaper tried to whip up a non-existent story as a diversion. Contrary to what was alleged in the "electronic media" it said, the incident had nothing to do with the GWU protest. Of course, no one who matters said it did.

Violence has thankfully been expunged from our political system. And for this there are two men who deserve credit - Eddie Fenech Adami, who changed this country, and Alfred Sant, who changed his party.

There is now one final lesson for Muscat's party to learn. Do not fear the truth about an act of violence, even if it is allegedly perpetrated by one of your own. Then you can take life a bit more lightly, like Farrugia did at Mater Dei.