I suppose the government’s tactic is ‘blitz them and leave them reeling’, to hit us with so many shocking things that we cease to feel anything at all, to grasp just how bad it really is. Some of us must be looking back now at Tonio Fenech’s arlogg tal-lira and Austin Gatt’s occasional choice remark and thinking, ‘What was that all about?’

The Labour Party literally persecuted its perceived enemies when it was in Opposition, digging its teeth in and not letting go. There were reams of questions in parliament and big front-page stories in its newspapers and those of its sympathisers, about innocuous contracts and contacts, about appointments that were entirely justified. Anybody reading and listening to all of that would have imagined that Labour was going to be a Savonarola in government. That’s one of the reasons for its landslide victory. It created the perception of corruption and vast, deep and rampant abuse, and went wild with it.

People thought their anger was real and that it came from purity of soul and spirit. I thought differently, which is why I am now in the rather comfortable position of being able to say, as I knew I would having already been through the exact same experience in 1996 with pretty much the same carping critics, that I was nowhere near as wrong as lots of people made me out to be. I suppose the reason is not so much that I have been writing about politics since I was in my early 20s, but that I think it’s best to assess politicians as one would any other person. It’s when I deviate from this maxim and ignore my informed instinct that mistakes are made. On the whole, I find people quite easy to read – part of it comes with age and experience but much of it is natural perception and observation. That’s why it never failed to astonish me when people could not read Joseph Muscat like a book or pick up all the negative signals that were literally coming off him in waves. But then I learned to take that inability for granted. Lots of people are taken in by conmen and scammers in every other area of life, love and work, so why should politics be any different.

During the Labour Party’s five-year electoral campaign, I could see quite clearly that they genuinely believed large chunks of their own propaganda, and that their ideas and certainties about how their rivals were behaving in government were based on their own behavioural standards. I knew, somehow, that all their outrage, real and assumed, about how The Others were snatching, grabbing and snorting at the trough came from their own ideas about what people will do when they think themselves able to do it, what they would have done themselves had they the opportunity. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were so annoyed and angry not because they thought it was being done, but because they wanted to do the same themselves.

It was from this constant nagging feeling that Labour yelled so loudly about snouts in the trough because their own snouts would have been deep in that trough had they been given the chance that my pre-electoral conviction grew about the rush to grab as much as possible that would follow the inevitable Labour victory. But whenever I talked about this, in conversation or in print, nobody wanted to know. The Nationalists were evil and – a far worse sin – boring and ugly. The Labour Party was absolutely wonderful and sparkling, full of new ideas and utterly moral and perfectly correct. I understood then something I never quite got before: why it is relatively easy for leaders of obviously suspect sects, who are abusive and in it for themselves, to gull others, control them, have power over them and take their money. Muscat used the methods of a sect leader. His ‘movement’ operated like a sect; it even had cells lead by individuals whose business it was to recruit others – except that they didn’t do it by knocking on doors wearing black suits and white shirts, but by taking them out for days on their boat and then asking them whether they would like to meet ‘Joseph’ (the sect leader), or courting them relentlessly with parties and invitations to this and that. And Muscat’s party traded on the need of the weak and the vulnerable to be part of a group, to belong, to be ‘in’.

But ultimately, it was all about what power could get for them personally – the jobs, the contacts, the salaries, the protection, the favours, the permits, the trips and journeys, the autograph-hunting meetings with political celebrities...