The Labour Party has seen fit to try and obscure its leader’s truly abysmal performance at the university, the fact that he was booed and hissed, and his hasty exit through the backdoor, by bringing out the smelling-salts and pretending to feel faint with shock. The cause is the appalling sound of the f-word falling from the lips of a 19-year-old youth who had had enough of cameras being shoved in his face for 30 minutes so that his private conversation with his aunt and mother could be recorded and broadcast for partisan purposes. I respect him for standing up for me, and I admire his restraint in using only the f-word and not also the matching reverse salute. At his age, I would have grabbed the nearest camera, shoved it down the cameraman’s mouth and out the other end. I am not a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, which is why I never had any trouble with bullies at school and I have no trouble at all coping with bullies in adult life. Humbly turning the other cheek in face of aggression and severe intimidation is not for me, and that’s why the Labour Party can’t cope where I’m concerned.

We now have an entire political party and its giant and powerful media machine pitted against a lone newspaper columnist who can’t stand Alfred Sant’s guts, thinks he is utterly awful and incompetent, and has absolutely no qualm about giving detailed reasons as to why she has reached these studied conclusions. By exposing a 19-year-old private citizen who plays no part at all in public or political life, to the violent hate of a mob in the throes of electoral passion, Labour is merely proving my point that it is not unduly burdened by common decency or scruples, even though it does like to bore on about corruption. Alfred Sant’s behaviour is made far worse by the fact that the youth his television station is exposing to violence and hatred is his own daughter’s flesh-and-blood cousin. He talks about families, but that’s as far as it goes: talk.

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His party’s website ran a story about the proceedings, claiming that I attacked the Super One ‘journalists’ – liberal use of the term – and screamed and shouted abuse at them. I have just filed a libel suit against them, and my son is suing them in his capacity as a private citizen who has been subjected to treatment worse than that meted out to political figures. Anybody who knows me in my 43-year-old incarnation will know just how unlikely this is, and their absurd story is contradicted by their own film footage, which shows me sitting unmoved with my hands in my lap, after having whispered to my sister to ignore them until, to use the expression of another newspaper columnist in another newspaper, they “travelled away with sexual intent.” You can rest assured that if I had attacked their ‘journalists’ and screamed at them, you would be thoroughly sick of the footage by now. So if they haven’t used it, they don’t have it, because it doesn’t exist, because it didn’t happen.

The Maltastar.com ‘reporters’ wrote a story saying that the crowd, most of whom wore PN scarves, was dominated by a PN mob. Then they undermined themselves by showing photographs of a bunch of nice kids, with not a PN flag or scarf in sight. Like the rest of the Labour Party, they’re not really hot on details. My 42-year-old sister was described as a ‘young student’, and when she wrote in to complain, they didn’t publish her letter. I told her that perhaps I should introduce her to BoobJob Jason, who might want some more hot tips on non-existent plastic surgery. And apparently, I was responsible for organising the booing and hissing of a thousand students – me, who can’t even get my own sons to pick their underpants off the floor or fill the dogs’ water-bowl.

The Labour Party, on the other hand, is pretty good at bossing teenagers and students around. It has a whole cave of elves hard at work on its propaganda. These are the same elves who were writing identikit letters to the English-language newspapers, until I twigged what was happening and wrote about it. And then they stopped. Now the elves have gone on line, posting comments on YouTube and especially on the on-line version of The Times. Their letters all follow versions of the same pattern: “I am a university student/floating voter/disgruntled Nationalist and I am so ashamed of the disgusting behaviour by students and the son of Daphne and the fact that Gonzi didn’t silence them that I really see we need a change and so I will vote Labour.” The dead give-away? Most of them spell ‘tolerant’, ‘intolerant’ and ‘intolerance’ with a double ‘l’ like the Maltese, and by an even more amazing coincidence, this is how the Labour students’ organisation Pulse also spells the words in its pidgin-English statements (how were they ever let into university in the first place, if they can’t write or spell?) and how it is spelt by the person delegated to post Super One clips on YouTube. Rumbled again, elves – and when you write in to object, please remember that the singular of elves is elf, and not elve, because you didn’t seem to know that last time.

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By using a 19-year-old to get at his mother, the Labour Party are really going about as low as they can get. And with Labour, low is so low that the only way is up.

The Labour Party is showing us, fortunately before the general election and not afterwards, that despite the democratic clothes it has put on in recent years, it has not actually changed. It was, is and probably will remain for some years longer an autocratic party with a totalitarian mindset. Auto-criticism or internal criticism are not allowed, which is why the party itself is in such a sorry mess with a leader who has already lost two general elections on the trot and one referendum which he pretends he won.

The party will not accept external criticism, and will go to any length to silence those who criticise it or its Great Leader. In my case, it involves the deployment of a giant media machine, and the sort of incitement to hatred among the mob that has led to the presence of two security officers outside my home on round-the-clock shifts. These are tactics used by the worst of totalitarian regimes, and are not consonant with life in a democracy where freedom of speech is respected. The Labour Party is behaving as though I am a politician running for office or paid out of public funds rather than a writer for an independent newspaper. An attack against a newspaper columnist who freely expresses her opinions about politics is tantamount to an attack on the free press. Because it cannot use other means to silence me as it would have been able to do in the past, the Labour Party has resorted to these desperate methods instead.

The Labour Party has much to be ashamed of, and I am happy to say that rather than silencing me, its aggression towards me and other members of my family has only served to make me even more determined to expose the party’s considerable inadequacies for what they are. It has fired up the rest of my family in a similar fashion, with the result that the older brothers of the Labour Party’s latest victim, who were more or less indifferent to politics before, are now all agog to vote against his aggressor, and will probably carry on doing so for the rest of their lives as a consequence. The Labour Party is not fit to govern. It is not even fit to be in Opposition. There is too much that it cannot understand. Oh, and it’s incompetent.

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The MLPAD contingent wonders out loud, and for partisan reasons, why the prime minister did not silence the students when they booed Alfred Sant. They clearly do not understand that in a democracy, the prime minister does not have authority to tell others when to speak and when to fall silent. An appropriate reason for shock and shame would be if he had done just that: shut the students up. Students are not children. They are adults. Oh, and I’ll say it again: Malta is now a democracy, not an autocracy.

You cannot ban booing and hissing unless you also ban clapping. They are the two sides of the same coin: one shows disapproval, the other shows approval. And in a democracy, you can ban neither. I’ve heard a lot of rubbish about good manners. I find it very odd that Labour elves who are half my age, from a different socio-educational background, and who can’t even spell, presume to hector me about manners and behaviour. Bad manners is shoving a television camera in somebody’s face with the sound on so that you can record their private conversation for political reasons. Bad manners is doing what Alfred Sant does all the time, refusing to answer questions and attacking the journalists who ask them, or insulting students’ intelligence by treating them as though they were attendees at some kind of coffee morning, hanging onto his every word.

Sant doesn’t know how to handle an audience. When he was booed, he should have said: “I know you don’t like me, but please let me say this.” There would have been an immediate silence. Instead, he persisted in insulting them, at one point even asking them whether they wanted change. Only somebody out of it would have asked that. Of course, they all yelled, “No! We want Gonzi!”

He wasn’t booed when he spoke about cancer, though he was pulling a cheap sympathy trick on an audience of people who still think they are immortal. He was actually applauded several times. But because he really can’t take criticism, a bit of booing sent him into a crazed frenzy, rushing back to headquarters to deploy his missiles on those who dared show him up for what he is.

This is the man who wants to become your prime minister once more: a man who can’t even take a bit of booing and hissing from a group of teenagers whom he tried so hard to deny an EU passport. How weak is that?

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When Alfred Sant was asked about his shoddy electoral programme, which includes 14 plans for things this government has already done, he turned to his audience and said: “Those were misprints.” Oddly, this is the same excuse that Charlie ‘DNA’ Mangion is using to exculpate himself from the accusation that he told an interviewer how overtime would be paid at the daily rate instead of time-and-a-half, if it is not going to be taxed. This campaign has been peppered with Labour misprints. The word has entered the vernacular as a euphemism for inanity.

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At the university debate on Monday, Josie Muscat spoke of himself in the third person and while haranguing his audience used the Maltese equivalent of eff off more than once. While speaking during a Broadcasting Authority debate on TVM, he referred to those who are on social services by the Maltese phrase for people who are on the receiving end of sodomy. Yet for some very odd reason, the Labour Party and MLPAD gang appear to be more shocked by the sight of a 19-year-old youth telling his mother’s harassers to eff off than by the sound of a doctor in his 60s, the owner of a large medical business and the leader of a political party, speaking like this in public forums and on television. The outrage should have been directed towards him, as setting an abysmal example to the young and impressionable, though I can see from the many public debates going on that the young are not necessarily impressionable and the impressionable are not necessarily young.

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This was Alfred Sant’s democratic response when pressed by a thousand students shouting “Irrispondi” to answer a journalist’s question as to whether he will acknowledge the result of another referendum: “Ahna nahdmu biss fuq bazi ta’ elezzjoni,” which means that he acknowledges only the results of general elections, not referendums. This response was greeted with loud booing, as was merited. I booed too, and enjoyed every second of it. It made a change from booing and hissing at the television set every time I see his wooden marionette face on One News, or patronising journalists and refusing to answer their questions on any one of the three television stations.

The only time that face lights up is when it is being ‘interviewed’ by the lovely Simone Cini – for which, of course, I can hardly blame him. Perhaps NET TV and TVM need to dispatch some Carla Bruni look-alikes to get an answer out of him about what he plans to do with the surcharge and his repeater class. He famously fancies her - so maybe after all he’s not a wind-up toy with a voice recording that doesn’t allow him to answer questions but plays the same tune all the time: korruzzjoni, korruzzjoni, korruzzjoni, korruzzjoni, bidu gdid, bidu gdid, bidu gdid, bir-rispett kollu, bir-rispett kollu, bir-rispett kollu. He told an interviewer from The Sunday Times last week that when he was being put under anaesthetic, all he could think about was Nicolas Sarkozy having fun with Bruni. Over this, I shall draw a discreet veil, because it doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Apart from being a rotten public speaker, Sant has no idea how to handle an audience, or cope with people he doesn’t like or those who don’t like him. His body language on Xarabank last Friday bristled with hostility and antagonism towards Joe Azzopardi and the few members of the audience who challenged him with valid questions and assertions. The rest of the audience clapped and cheered him, making him glow visibly and presenting him with the opportunity, when they booed Joe Azzopardi, to say grandly, while silencing them with a sweeping gesture of his arm: “We’re not at the university here.” And they fell quiet immediately, as only Labour supporters will do, who don’t understand that the prime minister has no authority over them. No wonder they landed themselves with the anti-democratic Mintoff, the anti-democratic KMB, and now the anti-democratic Sant who doesn’t believe in referendums, tells his audience to shut up, and attacks journalists who dare pose him difficult questions.

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Alfred Sant celebrates his 60th birthday on Wednesday, but I dare say that he and his party will let this momentous occasion, a landmark anniversary that people usually celebrate with parties, family and friends, pass unnoticed. So let’s all wish him a happy birthday from our armchairs, and cheer him enormously as he contemplates the Kartanzjan that’s just plopped into his letterbox. It is fortunate for him that, thanks to this government, he can earn a salary and still collect his pension when he turns 61 next year. With the combination of a prime minister’s salary and an ex-prime minister’s pension, plus his halved electricity surcharge, he’s going to be pretty comfortable.

Daphne Caruana Galizia also writes a column for The Malta Independent every Thursday. All recent columns can be read on line at www.independent.com.mt in the archive section under ‘opinion’.