In politics, you know that a party is in crisis, but still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it, when various elements within it decidedly reached the pits. History is full of them and all part of an ongoing cycle that one day or another strikes every party in the world. It is when individuals become, or assume themselves to be, bigger than the party they purport to belong to, exploiting in the process their previous status of power to get as much mileage as they can from an indulgent section of the media.

If pathetically turning a massive State donation to help cancer patients of all political colours into a negative issue is not the pits, then I don’t know what else it can be. One wouldn’t want to be the leader of these maverick, politically expired ex-ministers when they choose to machete their way into futile controversy. It must be pretty frustrating for those seeking to pick up the pieces from two consecutive electoral defeats to find that they have to start all over again every time they think they have finally started to make headway towards a future of growth, as is after all the aim of every decent opposition party in any given country.

You wouldn’t want to be in Adrian Delia’s shoes, for example. Some discontented members of his parliamentary group, who had earlier taken a stance against his taking over the leadership despite huge grassroots support, have been furiously trying to demonise a most positive act that sees the authorities donating money for a good cause – €5 million to help “Puttinu Cares” in the building of much-needed flats in central London for Maltese cancer patients and their families. That this donation has been made at the same time that the government has been reducing taxes and achieving an economic surplus sadly does not seem to figure in any way in these people’s transfixed minds. One even had the temerity of wielding his own unfortunate cancer treatment as a political bludgeon, notwithstanding the fact each and every one of us of goodwill had, at that sad moment, shared our thoughts and prayers with him.

The PN leader has wisely steered clear from this utter negativity, restricting himself to a social media post in which he rightly praised the enormous efforts of the army of volunteers who run charity organisations, while, also rightly, emphasising the government’s duty to offer assistance wherever and whenever needed. A clean-cut, safe statement that says a lot more than the few words written.

You cannot blame Adrian Delia for soft-pedalling over the issue when he is, intentionally or not, put in this awkward position. Each and every one of us who were watching Xarabank’s Puttinu edition on Good Friday witnessed the joy on people’s faces the moment the Prime Minister announced the donation from Australia. These were not Labourite or Nationalist faces, they were faces reacting to what was certainly a timely and effective gesture. They were the faces of hard-working volunteers, the faces of family members of cancer patients and ex-cancer patients who acknowledge it is never enough to soothe their pain, their fears, but certainly builds on what has already been so satisfactorily achieved over the decades under different administrations.

To be negative on such an issue and to resort to such words as “insult”, as the glum band of PN dissenters led by a confirmed loser have done simply because the donation has come from the social fund associated with the EU-approved Individual Investor Programme (IIP) they have opposed from the start, is indeed the pits. Certified and judged so by the majority of people of goodwill on these islands and not by a meagre newspaper poll that is as credible as its frequent fake news.

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Home thoughts from abroad

The global issue of free speech has become so immersed in political one-upmanship and jingoistic convenience that one feels lost as to what and who to believe anymore. For example, Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, has had all communications cut off, blocking his internet access, and not allowed any visitors soon after his tweet about the arrest in Germany of the Catalan leader Carlos Puigdemont.

John Pilger, award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, has come out condemning the move, insisting “this is about a war on freedom of speech; this man is being denied the most basic right – freedom of speech. It’s part of a wider war. The wider war is against known enemies, and Russia is one of them, China is another.”

The poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter last month is a case in point. The British Government has bluntly blamed the attack on Russia, but the allegations have been denied by Moscow, saying that no evidence has been presented to support the claim. This was followed by a Western chorus of condemnations and expulsions of Russian diplomats.

It has now transpired that the UK’s own top defence lab, Porton Down, has admitted it cannot trace the poison, with its scientists insisting they cannot say the nerve agent, Novichok, used in the Skripal case actually came from Russia. No facts. No evidence and the world is expected to take the UK government’s word for it. Its Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, went as far as saying to a German broadcaster that the evidence was provided by the Porton Down laboratory, the very lab that has now said it cannot say so.

Isn’t it ironic that we now have a former vice-president of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and state secretary to Germany’s defence minister, Willy Wimmer, saying: “I think we would call this state a mafia state because it is against all European and international rules and regulations how the British government has behaved in a criminal case with regard to another country.” Home thoughts from abroad.

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Heavenly blunder

The Italian TV space pundit on the RAI 3 news bulletin had many people in southern Italy, Sicily and Malta worried with his calculation that China’s Tiangong-1 space module could re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and break up over their region, with the hazards entailed. On one occasion during his three-day “expert” guest appearance, he even specifically mentioned “Valletta, Malta”. My own sardonic reaction was “Oh, no, not during Valletta 18.”

Tiangong-1, sent into orbit in 2011 for experiments as part of China’s space programme, eventually broke up over the South Pacific. Not exactly a stone’s throw away from the lands of pizza and ħobż biż-żejt. But then, it had also originally been said that the space station was expected to re-enter off the coast of Brazil in the South Atlantic, near the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro!

What is intriguing in all this worldwide media coverage of the re-entry of Tiangong-1, which translates to “Heavenly Palace”, is that spacecraft re-entering the world atmosphere is today a normal occurrence. Why the focus on this one, just because it happened to be Chinese, is not as confounding as it looks. China’s fast-growing aerospace industry is not going unnoticed by the West where the media inevitably obliges with its orchestrated hype.