A public opinion survey commissioned by a newspaper shows that the number of those who plan to vote Yes in the divorce referendum has decreased by 11 per cent since last month. I wasn’t pleased about this, of course, but I was quite reassured to see that my antennae for gauging these things are in full working order

I had written some weeks ago that the Yes campaign, and more particularly the two widely disliked and irritating MPs who front it, would lead to a haemorrhage of support while the presence of respectable persons at the head of the No campaign would cause some people to doubt their choice in favour of divorce legislation and give others psychological ‘permission’ to be against it, or at least, not in favour of it.

Campaigners are effective only if people trust their judgement and think that their opinion is credible, whether they agree with them in other matters or not. People think that Arthur Galea Salamone and Andre Camilleri are serious and credible, whether they agree with their views or not. This means they will listen to them, and once a campaigner has grabbed his audience’s attention, he has won half the battle. Dr Camilleri’s credibility is so strong that it wasn’t even dented by his illogical and nonsensical blooper about not allowing violent men to divorce because they could go on to do the same to another wife. Joyce Cassar also has a certain amount of gravitas about her, which helps.

The public faces of the No campaign are Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, who is handicapped by a variety of issues, including the perception that he is doing this to sort out his own situation (people do not support those they think have a vested interest, even if they share that interest), distaste for the manner in which he compromised the prime minister, doubts about his personality, and general impatience with his behaviour since 2008.

Evarist Bartolo is unattractive in all sorts of other ways – and here I don’t mean physically because in a debate on divorce legislation, being physically attractive can actually work against you, though I have yet to work out why exactly. Mr Bartolo has an unpleasant way of speaking, with nasty asides that leave you wondering whether he’s fighting some barely-controlled general resentment. Like his counterpart Dr Pullicino Orlando, he gives vent to contemptuous verbal assaults on his interlocutors when this control snaps. This comes across really badly on television where, unlike with writing, the tone of voice and facial expression convey more than the words themselves. Deborah Schembri, the nice, comfy woman who is wheeled out to counter the effects of the unpleasant duo, does her best but it is not enough. Her arguments are sensible and well-researched, she has commonsense on her side, but there is something about her which just doesn’t convince. I can’t work out what it is.

It is one of the unfortunate truisms of single-issue campaigning that the facts and arguments are secondary to the qualities of those who front the campaign. When people dislike the campaigners or find them generally unconvincing, even if they agree with their stance they will distance themselves from it as a way of distancing themselves from the campaigners. It’s one of those strange, self-undermining paradoxes: if we don’t respect a person’s judgement, then we don’t want to share his or her opinion, because it makes us doubt our own judgement. Synthesised to its essence, it comes down to this: “If Jeffrey agrees with it, then it must be wrong. If I share Jeffrey’s opinion, then I must be like him, and I don’t want to be like him. So I will change my opinion.” People don’t actually think this out step by step and consciously, but that is pretty much the psychological process.

A couple of people to whom I have spoken have blamed the drop in support for divorce legislation on the renewed efforts of parish priests, the archbishop and other holy men. This is nonsense. The Roman Catholic Church has always been famously against divorce. This is known by every Catholic and also widely known even among non-Catholics. It is one of the defining characteristics of the religion. It is not as though people were thinking that they would vote Yes because the Archbishop’s Curia was all right with it, but then changed their minds after a Sunday sermon about the evils of divorce. We grew up on that sort of Sunday sermon. It’s nothing new. Besides, there are all sorts of things that Roman Catholicism tells us are terribly wrong, immoral and against God’s will, including the state of adultery that appears to be the alternative to divorce, the fornication that leads to 30 per cent of Maltese children being born out of wedlock, and the contraception that has led to the collapse of the birth rate and the vast majority of Maltese children born since 1990 growing up solo or with just one sibling. Three children are rare nowadays and four children constitute some kind of freak show, judging by the reaction to families of that size.

Joyce Cassar of the No campaign told an interviewer recently: “Percentages of children born out of wedlock have not stabilised or reduced anywhere where divorce was legalised. A Council of Europe study reveals that in France it stands at around 50%; Germany 30%; Spain 28%; and Norway as well as Sweden around 54%. I’m not saying that divorce is necessarily the culprit for this state of affairs, but neither has it solved the problem. I would say that it is part of the contributing factors to such realities. Our percentages, on the other hand, are very different.” Her interviewer was not well prepared, for otherwise he would have been able to put her straight on that one. The percentage of children who are born out of wedlock in Malta now ranks with that of Germany and Spain, at around 30%.

Ms Cassar, who describes herself as a single parent and who is therefore hardly in a position to talk, should learn the benefits of using language precisely. Verbal imprecision is off-putting because it betrays undisciplined thinking and insufficient knowledge – and that’s damaging when your job is to convince others. Divorce was not ‘legalised’, as she says – a surprising error, given that her co-leaders are very good lawyers. Something can only be legalised if it was previously illegal. Divorce was not illegal anywhere: it was merely not provided for in the law and was then provided for. You would, for example, legalise marijuana use, which is currently a banned practice that leads to prosecution. You do not legalise divorce because it stands to reason that it is not a banned practice. Even if a state wished to ban divorce, exactly what would be the point of doing so when people cannot be divorced without a legal mechanism introduced by the state itself? You can’t prevent people divorcing overseas, either, for reasons that are too long and complicated to go into here. And once they are divorced elsewhere, Malta has no choice but to register that divorce. If divorce were illegal in Malta, as so many people make the mistake of saying, then the Public Registry would not have a register of divorces, just as it has a register of births, deaths and marriages, but it does.