That I'm disappointed need hardly be said. I am fundamentally opposed to all hunting, for reasons that I've given time and time again, and on the matter of Spring hunting, unsustainable as it remains even if the Great Unwashed, bless their little cotton socks, don't care, I even had science on my side.

Be that as it may be, the electorate has spoken, God bless the electorate. That is the beauty of democracy, even the uncaring or the un-knowing have their say, which until someone makes me King of All I Survey will have to do as a system of decision taking.

Looking back, in sorrow rather than in anger, should I really have been surprised? After all, the country elected Joseph Muscat as Premier, with his very clear philosophy: be all things to all men, say nothing that will annoy anyone, in fact, say anything that will please every single voter possible.

What is more than slightly annoying, of course, is the opprobrium being poured over the Gozitans, clearly by people who haven't quite grasped the fact that in a referendum, there is no distinction between the electoral districts.

Strictly speaking: it is one constituency, just as it's one country under the law. So lay off the Gozitans, please, what did you expect a predominantly rural society to do, anyway?

Being teed off at the Gozitans is as sensible, less so, in fact, as being teed off against the many thousands who do care enough about the environment to get off their comfortably upholstered rear-ends and take a few minutes to vote.

This vast (in Maltese electoral terms, anyway) conglomeration are more deserving of scorn than the Gozitans, who at least voted. They didn't vote the way I would have wanted them to, but hey, at the end of the day who am I to grumble, all I did was write anti-hunting articles?

Pretty moronic, too, is the way the sandal-wearing tree-huggers have retired in a huff into their tents intoning "a plague on both your houses" in the general direction of both political parties.

If you want to look at the political reasons why the referendum was not won by the people who proposed it, look no further than the fact, stark as it is, that had Premier Joseph Muscat not stuck his oar in when he did and in the manner he did, the difference would not have been 2200 votes on the side of continuing to kill birds but very, very probably quite a bigger chunk more on the side of the "NO" vote.

Yes, I'd have liked Simon Busuttil to have taken the high moral ground and come out against Spring hunting, but that's a romantic notion that founders on contact with reality. Before Premier Muscat put his shoulder to the hunters' wheel, the tide was going against them badly: the poll numbers show this.

After Premier Muscat's lifebelt, the numbers went the other way, and they kept going the other way until, with the Labour Party machine humming like the well-oiled machine that it is, they managed to scrape together sufficient "yes' votes to carry the day, almost by as small a margin as the PN in 2008.

It was only because Busuttil neutered the partisan element that the gap was so small, if it had been a straight PN/MLP scrap, it would have been 2013 all over again.

And the "NO" camp needs to look at itself too: a bit like the dog that ran after the car not having the slightest idea what to do when it finally caught it, they seemed to have little idea "what next" after the referendum campaign was put into train.

I'm not much qualified to talk about how to run a campaign, or much else (as is often pointed out to me in the comments) but even I know that you don't keep telling the other lot, on the front page of your newspaper, to boot, that they're lagging behind. All that does is make them redouble their efforts, and look where that got us.

The only consolation is that from now on in, MaltaToday's polls won't be seen as reprints of Moses' Tablets.

There's plenty more that the "NO" camp did wrong, but it would be unfair to list them, because after all, they were the good guys, they didn't go around spreading misinformation, wild theories, false images and God knows how many other strokes of prestidigitation designed to bamboozle the electorate into staying home or, better yet, voting "yes".