Supporters of the Labour Party should now recognize that there is the need for a pause. It should be a period of quiet and attention till the new Prime Minister and Labour leader Robert Abela sets his action programme and takes his opening decisions.

At such a moment, there should be no scope for particular or personal requests and claims. All should give priority to the national and the party interest. After the ups and downs of the past weeks and the party’s internal leadership campaign, this will require that the chosen leader can act with tranquility, despite the physical tiredness that inevitably he will be experiencing.

I am convinced he will be more than up to the task of meeting the intial challenges. However it makes no sense at all to now burden him with futile distractions. It is obvious that Labour’s adversaries will attempt to do so. Clearly then, one should keep back from in any way giving them a helping hand, by actions that might lack the political prudence which is so necessary at this point in time.

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LANGUAGE SO GROSS

With the years, political conduct has become too loaded with outrageous language. I am not referring simply to Malta. Even in countries much larger, where one would expect behaviour to be more sophisticated than ours, it is likely that leading political figures manage to surpass with the exagerrated content of their speeches, those among our speechifiers who are most blunt.

One only needs to remember the ongoing tweets credited to President Trump or to Matteo Salvini in Italy... but not only they.

It is said that the social media have given rise to a landscape that accomodates this surge of gross language: there is no other way by which to describe it. However more disquieting than the fact that the ordinary citizen has adopted such a method of expression, is the finding that when leading politicians adopt it, they score political points.

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GHOSN

I saw on CNN the full formal press conference and on you-tube the second part of it in which he replied to questions placed by journalists who had congregated from all over the world. Carlos Ghosn gave an impressive presentation. He spoke as ex-chief of one of the largest car manufacturers in the world, Nissan-Renault, which for the duration of his leadership achieved enormous commercial successes; as the man accused of having defrauded the company of huge amounts, for which he was kept under arrest during long months in Japan; and as a fugitive from that country, now seeking “refuge” in Lebanon, of which he is a citizen.

For almost an hour and a half during the conference, Ghosn spoke with a total earnestness – and convincingly, to lay out his version of the story... According to him, he would have had no opportunity to do so under the Japanese system of administering justice (which he labelled “injustice”). He spoke eloquently in English, French, Arabic and Portuguese.

Ghosn had prepared well for this show, which gave him an opening to defend his name before the world’s media. With reference to the accusations he faces, one cannot conclude much about his guilt or otherwise, but to repeat, he did give a bravura performance.