Does Commissioner-hopeful Karmenu Vella suffer from the delusion that his was the only vote in the referendum held to determine whether we would become members of the EU?

Mr Vella's vote was, in fact, a single solitary one out of the many, many thousands cast and, to this extent, it was entirely irrelevant to the final result. It was also secret, unlike that of his party's leader at the time, so, without wishing to cast any doubts on Mr Vella's word, we only have his say-so today that he ticked the right box back then.

He has assured the European Parliament that he voted for Malta to join the EU, this being part of the evidence he has assembled to confirm his commitment to the European ideal. Let's take Mr Vella at his word, as we should, and accept that, indeed, he voted "YES" under cover of the confidentiality of the polling station.

Mr Vella was a member of Dr Alfred Sant's - sorry, irony of ironies, MEP Dr Alfred Sant's - Cabinet in 1996, the Cabinet which approved Sant's "freezing" (that is, cancellation) of Malta's bid to join the EU. Mr Vella was a High Panjandrum of the Labour Party when it campaigned ceaselessly to persuade the electorate to vote "NO", going as far as to say, as reported this morning, that membership would be harmful to Malta's tourism prospects.

But all of that was before he voted "YES" for membership, he's now telling us: before he had his Damascene episode on the way to the polling station, moving him to embrace the European Ideal at the very last moment, pencil poised over the "NO" box.

Is Mr Vella serious? Or does he really think that his was the only vote that mattered?

In a democracy, that is to say the system that we live under so far, it is the aggregation of the will of the people expressed through their votes that counts. Vella was a willing accomplice in Sant's withdrawal of our application in 1996 and also a willing and active participant in the Labour Party's efforts to persuade enough thousands to vote "NO" and keep us out.

He now says that, despite his outward, public, position, he secretly voted "YES". Karmenu Vella did not come out of the polling station in 2003 boasting that he had voted "YES", but it has become expedient now, in 2014, when it is safe to do so, to let this betrayal of his party's principles come to light.

Insofar as his revelation mirrors the revisionist tendencies displayed by many others in his party, including its current leader, who will soon be telling us that he voted "YES" too at this rate, we should not be surprised.

Does this make him a committed European, such that the European Parliament will give him the nod and position him to oversee the environment, including the regulation of hunting?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, if Mr Zimmerman will forgive me expropriating his words.