There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. Those chilling words, made even more powerful by what happened mere minutes after they were posted, capture in stark relief what this country has been allowed to become.

This, it need hardly be said, is the most difficult column I have ever had to write and I’ve started it in my head – and scrapped it – innumerable times. Even as I write, I think back and delete and rewrite. The struggle is threatening to defeat me.

Daphne was virtually family, I’ve known her for longer than I’ve known my own son. I see her husband Peter pretty much every day of my working life and I used to – still do, stopping myself just in time – click on her page regularly, like everyone I know.

Even in the context of media work, we go back many years; she edited my first columns when she ran The Circle.

So much has been written about her elsewhere, and so much better than I’m managing, though, that these words are starting to feel inadequate and shallow. But, selfishly, I’ve got to finish this, to get it off my chest, as it were. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday shooting my mouth off, mainly to various journalists, because as a friend and colleague, I had some credentials for this. I was lucky I could, because I was allowed to keep myself from thinking about Monday.

What makes Daphne’s last public words so horrific, to my mind, is that one word, “now”.

She wasn’t generalising, being dramatic for effect, but making a stark declaration: the country has been (not is being) taken over by crooks. We have come to this because the people who hold sway over our lives have allowed it, have presided, laughing all the way to the polls, over the castration of the very institutions on whom we relied to protect us.

Daphne was killed because this country has become what it has become, what we have allowed it to become

The situation is – not is becoming or might turn into or is looking – desperate. Daphne’s language was always precise, a masterclass in saying exactly what just had to be said, and those last words were simply that: exactly precise.

Crooks have overrun the country and we have not lifted a finger to stop them. We are all responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, because we all sat back and did nothing.

The apologists, the people who dearly want nothing more than to bury their heads in the sand and carry on with their lives, will say that this is alarmism and these things don’t happen in Malta.

It did happen, this was no accident or random act of violence: this was someone being eliminated, once and for all.

Evarist Bartolo went beyond the pale, unsurprisingly. He is a bitter man of the eighties and flew the kite that people shouldn’t be distracted by this tragedy from appreciating the real good that the government has done for everyone. Only Bartolo knows what he was trying to say, but I know what it sounded like.

Daphne didn’t “die” she was killed, targeted directly and eliminated. And she was not killed because she “went beyond the limits” (despite Deborah Schembri’s stupid remark) or because she exposed some aspect of someone’s personal or professional life he or she wanted to be kept dark. She was not killed, either, because she “lied” about someone or something.

These things might get you beaten up or fire-bombed or sued but not assassinated, cynically removed from the world by thugs working to someone’s orders. Why the orders were given, and by whom, and who paid for it, are the questions the investigators will ask. The extent to which they will get answers, with FBI help or not, is questionable, for various reasons.

But this is not the really the point: Daphne was killed because this country has become what it has become, what we have allowed it to become.

We are the people who didn’t, or wouldn’t, care, didn’t, or wouldn’t, listen or didn’t, or weren’t allowed to, care or hear. We are guilty of laziness, or of apathy or of simply being a normal citizen who felt comfortable in the assumption that there was someone, somewhere, looking out for us. Some of us are guilty of more, of actively obstructing – worse, of attacking the Rule of Law.

Some are guilty of the crime itself.

Again, if you think I’m being alarmist, just think things through, objectively.

Think about how, in the aftermath of an act of barbarism that has shocked the world, here, in this artificial bubble where the car you drive and the meals you eat are deemed measures of your worth, out of 11,000 students – the intellectual elite of this country – just about 100 felt moved to stand in protest and commemoration of my friend Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Peter, Matthew, Andrew and Paul, forgive us: no, forgive me. I wasn’t there for her.