When I first moved here, following a moderately successful career at the high-circulation end of Fleet Street, I was offered a job (that I declined) as consultant editor to one daily/Sunday newspaper group, and consulted (but not offered a job) by another.

I told them both the same thing: that in the absence of any effective Opposition in this country’s Parliament, the newspapers had a duty to assume that role.

That was many years ago, and I probably trotted out some of the old clichés, like “newspapers should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, that they should not flatter fools in high places. That “news” was something that someone, somewhere, didn’t want to see in print.

I said that newspapers should scrutinise both the people and the proceedings of parliament and should expose all elements of wrong-doing.

I probably even told them about the editor of the Skibbereen Eagle in south-west Ireland who, in 1898, had warned the Czar of Russia that his weekly newspaper was “keeping an eye on you”.

Because both newspaper groups, while declaring that they were “independent”, were basically pro-government in their leanings, I conceded that, yes, of course, they should also give credit where it was due.

But I almost certainly said that newspapers were usually better, more vibrant, more effective, more powerful – and more successful in terms of circulation – when in direct opposition to the government.

The situation today is that, worse than having no effective opposition, either in Parliament or in print, Malta has no opposition of any kind. Not even a party of the opposition. Not even a leader of the Opposition.

Shame on Malta, shame on Parliament, shame on what used to be the PN.

What used to be the governing party, but lost the plot to what transpired to be a bunch of shyster lawyers, has lost it even in its own governance. The people who voted for Adrian Delia said that the party needed “an outsider”. They were wrong: they needed a leader, one experienced in the rough side of politics who might, even remotely, have a chance of winning an election.

They needed prime ministerial material with some sort of track record. They didn’t get it.

They are now led by a bloke who, until exposed by one journalist who seems to keep a Skibbereen eye on everybody, exposed him as a “wrong ‘un”, was unknown throughout the land. He has no experience of anything except of being just another Maltese lawyer (and there’s no shortage in that category).

This guy may have got slightly more than half the votes, but that was nowhere near half the votes of people who were eligible to cast them.

And some of the votes he gained we now know to have been forged.

In other words, the party that was going to be cleaned up and then to reform and scrutinise the workings of the government, knowingly rigged its own internal election.

The nation is in total disarray, with a government that behaves as it likes, rightly or wrongly, and apparently legally or illegally

Even in a country that is recognised as being corrupt from top to bottom, this seems like stretching things a tad too far.

So now we who care are looking at the remnants of a party that is even worse than being simply “split”, as many – even successful – political parties around the world are; it is also bent.

(I use the term “we”, although I, as a tax-paying long-term resident and, at the time of writing, an EU citizen, am not eligible to vote here.  But I have a reasonable interest in knowing how my money is being spent, and by whom, and into which brown envelopes my taxed money is being stuffed.)

Not even a second spin-off faction is likely to satisfy the old PN voters. Having been offered two candidates as leader, it transpired that the majority didn’t fancy either of them.

One simple – perhaps the only – appeasing solution might be to bring back Simon Busuttil, the man who spectacularly lost the last election for them.

Another cliché is that elections are not won, but lost. And Busuttil (like May in the UK, as it happens) was shamefully badly advised in his campaign. But here is a man that, first, the country and the party have actually heard of. He is an insider. He has experience. He is seen as being “clean”. He is polite and presentable.

And if anybody is going to clean up the party (hopefully by immediately sacking all those who rigged the election for his successor, and after dumping his campaign advisers), and try to clean up the government, he is the only man left standing who could do it.

Otherwise the portents are for a multi-party system for Malta, with the only possibility of ousting the government being an unlikely coalition of disparate odds and sods who wouldn’t be able to agree on a single policy, even among themselves. A group that, despite being Maltese, couldn’t run a brothel.

But it wouldn’t work, because none of the small parties would have a foreseeable chance of winning, and the Maltese don’t willingly vote for losers.

So the nation is in total disarray, with a government that  –  even more so than before – behaves as it likes, rightly or wrongly, and apparently legally or illegally.

It is a government that seems set in place for the lifetime of the current generation, and even though the Prime Minister has intimated that he may not stay in place after the next election, Malta has got itself back into a Mintoffian situation that will effectively be a dictatorship. Call it “socialism with benefits”.

When the loudest voice of opposition has been the single warning siren of a woman known throughout the land as “DCG”, and when she, alone, is intent on “cleaning up” both parties, and when she proves her independence and fairness by exposing unwelcome information about members of both parties (and thus being turned on by the Opposition that she had tried to help regain power), the country is the loser.

She reminds me of the soldier in the Changing the Guard ceremony whose proud mother said: “Look, they are all out of step, except my son.”

In Malta, currently, they are all out of step, except Daphne.

They truly are.

So… where’s the Opposition, now?

Revel Barker is a semi-retired journalist, an author and publisher and long-time resident of Gozo.

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