Electoral campaigns are extraordinary for politicians and journalists, for anyone who works in the news media. They eat up all your time and attention as you leap from topic to topic, from event to event, press statement to counter press statement, to press conference to accusation to policy document.

Did I say ‘policy document’? Believe me when I say that I don’t even know what the policies or promises of both major parties are. I haven’t seen an electoral programme at all. But to be frank, I have never read one of those things. With political leaders, politicians in general, and certainly political parties, I just work out whether I like them or not, and that’s enough for me. I’m not going to buy a policy document or electoral programme off somebody I don’t trust to implement it, or from whom I get a really bad feeling.

Like Alfred Sant, but for very different reasons, Joseph Muscat has always given me a bad feeling, so his excesses over the last four years really were no surprise to me. I suppose a lot of you remember that scene on my doorstep four years ago, on the eve of polling day, under the cameras I’d called in when two police officers turned up to arrest me. But you may not remember what I said. I was laughed at, mocked, by many thousands of people who were planning to rush out to vote for Joseph and his wonderful bandwagon the very next day. They had no idea. But I did – not just because I knew ‘Joseph’ in his Super One days when we were both staff journalists (well, I was – he was a party propagandist), but also because I could see the cynicism with which he was building a machine to rob the country. When he shouted about (Nationalist) government corruption – a clock, things like that – I always got the distinct impression that he was not outraged or scandalised, but envious. He thought the Nationalists were robbing the country blind and stuffing every government department with their cronies (they really did not, as we now know) and he wanted the chance to do more than that.

But what was the essence, the gist, of what I said on my doorstep that night, four long years ago of corruption, stress, violations and abuse? It was fear. That’s right: fear. The fear, buried since 1987, kicked in like post-traumatic stress disorder immediately I saw the police at the gate. Instincts that had lain dormant for almost three decades kicked in immediately: “Quick, take my laptop and hide it in the woodpile,” I said to one of my sons, who was in the house at the time. “And if you see it’s getting really heavy, take it and go over the back wall into the valley, then walk down to Burmarrad and somebody will pick you up later.”

Then I spoke to the cameras which turned up about how I didn’t want to live under Labour. How I didn’t want to live with a Cabinet of government composed of people I associated with the direst years of my past, that seeing individuals like Karmenu Vella and Joe Grima and Alex Sciberras Trigona coming to the fore again when they should have long been buried by history after the horrendous nature of the years they were in government in the 1980s, was just intolerable. That I didn’t trust Muscat one iota because he is underhand and amoral, that nobody prepared to resurrect fossils from Malta’s nightmare past could be trusted. The surge of fear that I felt – and I really am not the kind of person to feel fear generally – surprised me. It came from the subconscious, and it was 100 per cent accurate.

I knew, I just knew, that disaster beckoned, that the next few years would be horrible, that that night marked the end of normal life as we all knew it, whether we wanted to accept it or not. Having to cope with these feelings of dread at what I knew beyond doubt would happen, while my friends, colleagues, associates and complete strangers behaved as though a great new dawn had broken and ‘Joseph’ was the coming man, was agony.

It was agony not only because I had to listen to such rubbish from people who talked as though they had been drinking Kool-Aid on Jim Jones’s orders, in a brainwashing jungle settlement in Guyana, but mainly because I knew beyond doubt that some of my friendships, relationships, were now permanently ruined. Adults I had respected, liked, were speaking like teenagers at sixth form college, fascinated by the new boy (or girl) who talked big and flattered everyone while working away at people’s weak spots and Achilles’s heels.

I have no idea what to expect this morning, what the result of the general election can possibly be. In fact, this is always the most difficult Sunday column to write: the one written on the day that we vote. And in the course of the last 27 years, I have had to write a few of them. Today, I will simply say this: if Muscat and his henchman Schembri have been returned to power, Malta is finished, and all those who can leave should do so, especially the young. And the main reason you should leave is not just the imminent destruction of the economy, but because it is not good for decent people to have to live among a corrupt electorate. A corrupt government is bad enough.

 

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