The PM’s plea comes too late

The Prime Minister’s message last Sunday urging supporters to “stop personal attacks” is certainly laudable, but its timing betrays unprincipled opportunism.

It is shocking it is only now that Lawrence Gonzi decided to make this plea. Why didn’t he deliver this message before, when his party’s vilest supporters attacked the Labour leader’s family, and other prominent Labour exponents and their families?

We had to take legal action against those villainous supporters. And we won. Because the courts, even on appeal, understood that we were right to argue that the attacks were unfounded and villainous. Threats to go to the Strasbourg Human Rights courts were, and have remained, empty. I am sure that is how they will remain.

Where was the Prime Minister then to make his appeal against ad hominem attacks and character assassination? His abdication of his duty as moral leader of the nation, as opposed to the opportunistic leader of a political faction, is striking.

In his The Spirit of the Laws, the great French thinker Montesquieu writes: “The corruption of government begins almost always with the corruption of its principles.”

The least Dr Gonzi owes everybody is an apology.