Maybe it’s because the weather has been a touch less hot and sticky or maybe there are vestiges of creeping maturity taking hold, but there have been signs of late that the more rabid of commentators to blogs and news stories are being replaced by the voice of reason. I was going to use “commenters” but the flippin’ laptop insisted on scrawling a squiggly red line underneath, and it would only accept commentators.

For instance, a story about the recent tragedy at sea, involving a loss of life in excess of fifty souls (and I use the word pointedly) didn’t attract a unanimity of voices calling for the AFM to stay in port. Admittedly, when I had a shufti through the electronic papers this morning, before settling down to write this, it was still early (the hazards of middle age – sleep is less easy to come by) and those who tend to wrap themselves in the flag in the hope that their incipient racism is disguised probably hadn’t yet dragged themselves out of the pit.

This is not to say that there haven’t been rails and rants of peculiarly virulent strains. Toni Abela, Deputy Leader of the MLP for its affairs, for example, has been sounding off at Daphne Caruana Galizia because, apparently, she slipped from the highest of high standards Dr Abela seems to have set for her. From the depths of Dr Abela’s elevated tones, you can glean that, horror of horrors, Mrs Caruana Galizia made reference to some female bits and pieces and, even greater horror of horrors, compared some of Labour’s great and good to said bits and pieces.

Oh dearie dearie me, what a scandal, what sheer embarrassment, pass me the smelling salts, won’t you, Mildred, I’m feeling one of my turns coming on.

Dr Abela saw fit to insert me, in my other writing incarnation, into the proceedings, seemingly because he felt I should have chastised Daphne for her crass vulgarity and, even more, for her lese majeste’ (again, those squiggly lines, but this time, I’m having it my way)

My response to Dr Abela, which thus far has only seen light of day in his blog, which isn’t exactly knocking on the doors of the Sunday Times Bestseller List (not even the paperback version) was that I’m not one of those cheap tabloid journalists who delight in pretending to be shocked by the motes in other people’s eyes while ignoring the beam in their own. I used the Maltese phrase “oqbra mbajjda”, if I recall correctly, which is a rather picturesque way of calling someone a hypocrite.

Let me give you an example of the sort of tabloid journalism to which I’m referring. You will recall that episode up at the University which contributed so much to Alfred Sant becoming the Leader of the Opposition, yet again, albeit for a few days, until he finally decided to chuck it. On that auspicious day, when the University students lived up to the promise of their forebears (that’s me folks) and told Labour precisely where to get off, a Super One news crew, doing their duty by their party if not by their profession, decided it would be a super wheeze to train their lenses on Daphne Caruana Galizia and her son, the latter not being a public figure. The young gentleman invited the Super One chaps to indulge in travel and amorousness, not in that order, whereupon a storm of Biblical proportions ensued.

You’d have thought, listening to the news broadcasts, that DCG and her offspring had been caught celebrating a Black Mass on the main altar of St John’s at noon on Easter Sunday, with an effigy of the Pope as the centre-piece.

What people like this don’t realise, of course, because they’re out of touch with the real world, inhabiting, as they do, a world made up of their own convictions and their own perception of the people to whom they have to appeal, is that by getting all up-tight and prissy about people, shock horror, using vulgar words, those of us who have a brain and use it just shrug and say “and so?”

We’re more shocked, you see, by rank hypocrisy, by self-serving pseudo-morality and by verbal and philosophical duplicity. We’re also way more shocked, if you like, by the way certain commentators pander to their own perception of what their “market” wants to hear, when they fail to condemn thuggishness and arrogance, say, when union leaders threaten to storm Castille, for all that we’d love to see that particular farce unfold.

We’re slightly more shocked, to an extent, to see the way a number of people, in the face of all the evidence, still lionise Dom Mintoff. The fanfare of raspberries blown the way of the Gaddafi Award for the Defence of Human Rights that he was given (I still can’t write that without shaking my head in awe at the potential for self-delusion within the autocratic left) prompted all the Dom-lovers to come out of the woodwork, rewriting history merrily as they churned out line after line after line after line of tripe about how Mintoff had, singlehandedly, dragged the poor out of the gutter, kicked out the Brits, educated us all, tended to our medical needs and, generally speaking, had been the Santa Claus to our Tiny Tim.

Or was that Scrooge?

I’ll be accused, by the younger Lil’Elves, of living in the past, while the older ones, probably using CAPITALS and mildly irregular spelling, vocabulary and syntax, will berate me for failing to recognise the magnificence that is Dom Mintoff.

To these, I’ll respond that a) the past is not so long ago that other people don’t keep dragging Mintoff, blinking myopically, out into the spotlight, for all of us who remember him with less than complete fondness to take the opportunity for some payback and b) taken as a whole, the Mintoff legacy is one of bitterness, classism, mediocrity and ill-mannered loutishness.

In fact, even taken on a case-by-case basis, there’s not much to recommend Mintoff to anyone seeking to take a benevolent view of our history, leaving aside one of the supreme ironies, that he was instrumental in our joining the European Union.