The day I boxed Muhammed Ali: and the day after

Imagine I once had a boxing bout with Muhammad Ali, whom oldsters like me also knew as Cassius Clay. He’d have pulverised me. On a scale of 1 to 100, puny silly me would have lost by 100. And that’s being very kind.

But imagine if, the day after I wriggled out of my comatose state, I miraculously made my way to the boxing ring and had another fight. Alone! Just me and my shadow. And I—totally alone with no one throwing any punches at me—won by just 60 out of 100. Or, to be clinically exact, I won by 68 percent.

Any resemblance to present politics and Adrian Delia is more than glaringly obvious.

Adrian Delia is seen as a hero by an ever-dwindling following. He contested a vote of confidence—not of no-confidence—run by his stooges and was voted in by mesmerised dullards sometimes called councillors. Yet he only managed to get 68% of those eligible to vote.

Excuse me if I beg to point out that this is hardly a great victory. On the contrary, I consider it a heavy and total defeat. A many-layered, sourly-flavoured defeat. A defeat to herald nothing but more defeats to come for Adrian Delia, the PN and, ultimately, poor old Malta.

The previous time Adrian

Delia had contested a vote within the PN he faced not the councillors but the party paidup members, the tesserati. In that ballot, he barely made it over the 50% mark when he beat—squarely but debatedly fairly—Chris Said. Said, the nice guy from Gozo, was hardly a Muhammad Ali; he was just a valid but way too grey opponent.

Adrian Delia and his PR men gloat about this latest victory, never mentioning that when his predecessors, Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi, called for a vote of confidence they garnered over 90% of the vote.

It was just as silly a victory by these two former leaders. But at least alone on the ring, unchallenged, untested, they pulverised the non-existent opponent. So to crow, as the inner circle of the PN is doing, about this latest result, is as petty and peculiar as me beating my shadow and saying I have made inroads after my total destruction by the revered boxer.

The PN is in so much trouble—actually if you’ll excuse my language it’s more like shit than trouble—that it has gone into siege mentality and misinterprets all facts to fit its narrative.

Let’s examine some facts without camouflage. Adrian Delia won the backing of 68% of his councillors who make up a small percentage of the tesserati who themselves are but a small percentage of the electorate. This electorate—the people who vote in a general or MEP election—is now made up of a huge number who will choose Labour and Joseph Muscat over Delia.

The 68% is not just risible because he played alone and still didn’t mange too great a result. He also won an insignificant, hollow victory which in electoral terms will consign him and the party he now leads to abject failure. Since his election as leader of the once mythical PN, the gap with Labour both in polls and in elections has grown.

The defeat at the next election if Delia remains leader will be as bad as when I challenged Muhammad Ali.

Delia, Puli, Kirsty and co. will be crushed. Not personally maybe but definitely as a team with the new way the PN has embarked on. They will lose so badly that Malta will be faced with a huger democratic crisis. An ever-dwindling opposition is bad news to everyone who has an iota of sense. This is especially so in the face of a Labour Party which has no real interest in, or love of, true democracy and proper governance.

If some PN stalwarts resign and set up an independent party, the way our voting system works will be pure poetry to Joseph Muscat and the Labour behemoth. The undreamt-of heights of gaining two-thirds of parliamentary seats—which hardly needs twothirds of the votes—will be another of Joseph Muscat’s goals he can tick off.

These are terrible times for our country, cast as it is in the grips of a mighty party at the helm with pure amateurs heading the party in opposition. Adrian Delia is a loser, through and through. Even when he obtains an amazing two-thirds majority vote.