Remember the time Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote: “My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, anytime. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my a**.”

All right, it wasn’t her, although it could easily have been. It was the late, iconoclastic, deliberately offensive Christopher Hitchens.

It was Hitchens who, in condemning the torturers and abusers at Abu Ghraib prison, wrote the Daphne-esque: “This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.”

Now, one of Hitchens’ great friends, Salman Rushdie, has joined fellow international writers in slamming the V18 chairman, Jason Micallef, as “outrageous” for his attitude to the memory of Caruana Galizia. The trolls were quick to respond that he didn’t know “the real Daphne”.

They’d better be careful. There’s a real risk that the more Rushdie gets to know about her, the more he might like her.

But then you’d expect Rushdie – who spent long years in hiding from Iran’s murderous international machine – to sympathise with a journalist who spent her entire career being targeted by a political party’s propaganda machine.

What about a citadel of top journalism like The Guardian? Glenn Bedingfield tried to explain the real Daphne to the newspaper, saying that she wasn’t really a journalist but a political commentator.

Never mind that, in the real world, a political columnist is considered a journalist. The Guardian, together with the New York Times, Reuters, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and 14 other news organisations, believes she was an investigative journalist too. Guardian journalists are among the 45 worldwide now working on stories that Caruana Galizia was investigating.

If you’re tempted to say they cannot have read the real Daphne, keep this in mind: they’ve read her secret files, not just scoured her blog for leads.

Still tempted? I suggest you go back to the newspaper archives. You might be in for a jolt.

The first time she wrote about ministers jumping the Gozo ferry queue was in June 1991, still in her first year as a columnist.

That was also the year she decried the destruction of Sliema, the takeover of public beaches by private interests, and when she described Malta as a banana republic because of rotten road signage and dangerous works.

It was the year in which she wrote: “My opinion, on gratitude to the government, for that which the government is obliged to provide, is widely known.”

By the time she was interviewed, two years later, by Georg Sapiano for Il-Mument, she had already targeted just about every senior and junior minister.

She was scathing about Giovanna Debono, whom she accused of being more interested in patronage than the national interest. She was accused of trying to bully Mario Galea, then a new MP and the Nationalist Party’s information officer.

A quarter of a century ago, a young mother began to describe the world as she really saw it… As she grew older, her vision grew darker. Then she was blown up

What about Labour? She was dismissive of Labour leader Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. But who today wouldn’t scoff at many of his announcements? Like the one that EU membership would lead to smaller homes and that this would affect Maltese women badly, as they could no longer be proud of them.

Caruana Galizia was outraged as a woman. But most of her early columns were concerned about casual, unthinking sexism, including from the PN government’s side. Sexism was much more of a running political theme than partisan politics.

Her coverage of the 1992 general election is almost open to the charge that she was too detached. One suspects a vote for the then new Alternattiva Demokratika.

In any case, her writing was considered sufficiently critical of everyone that many weren’t too sure of her voting preferences. Sapiano thought it was an interesting enough topic to ask who she voted for. She refused to answer.

By 1996, she was openly favouring the PN. She hoped that, if Labour were defeated, Alfred Sant would be dethroned. But in 1994 she wrote of a meeting that Sant had with youth representatives, in which she portrayed him as just about the only intelligent, reasonable person in the room.

She’s been said to have been uncritical of anyone in Eddie Fenech Adami’s inner circle. Really? By the time the 1996 general election came round, she had even harshly criticised his top advisor, Peter Serracino-Inglott, and joined others in accusing him of corruption. (Daniel Massa’s biography shows why the charges had no basis. Disclosure: Serracino-Inglott was my cousin.)

Only a few weeks before the 1996 election was called, she wrote a scathing article about the then deputy Prime Minister, Guido de Marco (which led to a libel suit she lost).

The article was called: ‘This is no normal democracy’. It shows her target was the system more broadly, at a time when Sant was promising modernisation.

If, from early on, some people spoke darkly about her hidden personal agenda and vendettas, it was because it was difficult to discern an agenda that unambiguously served any single political party.

Nationalist leaders were not immune. Fenech Adami was described as a village lawyer, his government’s relationship with the Church criticised, and his decision to accept the presidency, in 2004, decried. In 2011, Lawrence Gonzi’s most difficult year, she was highly critical of his position on the two most important issues: divorce and the Libya crisis.

There is something surprising about her first eight years or so of writing. The usual tone and rhetoric would be considered unremarkable and inoffensive in Malta’s English-language newspapers today.

Although, at the time, she was considered to be a scathing, hypercritical writer, almost all columnists write like her now. The memory of a scathing writer persists because, then, any direct, independent criticism of politicians, unhedged by praise, was unusual, and hence felt more deeply.

The first time the tone becomes radically sharper is in the 1996 article on de Marco. But the change becomes clearly permanent around 2000.

My hunch is that the darker, more strident tone had to do with her growing children. In the early articles, still very young, they feature in a humorous way – to expose the nutty side of managing a family in Malta.

By 2001, however, she was writing that she hoped her three sons (the eldest still a teenager) would build a future for themselves away from the island. Her view of Malta was changing from that of a comic country to a more sinister one.

One issue was Labour’s implacable opposition to joining the EU, which she considered a threat to her children’s future. Another, I guess, was the changing nature of the physical threats.

In 1993, she could tell Sapiano the anonymous notes made her laugh and that she kept them in the hope she could show them to her grandchildren one day. But later some of the intimidation put her children’s lives at risk.

The tone is ratcheted up several notches once she launches the blog in 2008. Some of it has to do with the genre. But the blog begins soon after the Labour media machine directly targeted her youngest son, showing his image over and over on TV. By the time she was killed, all her sons had been featured in Labour-connected broadcasting or social media.

None of this excuses her misjudgements. But the printed record is clear.

A quarter of a century ago, a young mother began to describe the world as she really saw it, in tones that were startling then but unremarkable today. As she grew older, her vision grew darker. Then she was blown up.

If we remember the real Daphne differently, it’s because we have let our memories become fictions.

ranierfsadni@europe.com