The John Dalli Reality Show

As the courageous rebels entered the very last bastion of Libya's repressive regime - Gaddafi's compound - my mind went back to the way John Dalli had described the conflict in March. Watching this video now it looks and sounds surreal.

Speaking about Libyans in practically racist terms - unlike us, he pontificates, they are culturally programmed for revenge - Dalli did not believe that the rebels were writing their own placards.

You see ignorance prevents them from expressing their thoughts against tyranny in proper english. I suppose everyone in Qormi has gone to a Swiss finishing school.

The EU commissioner complained that it was the media which had turned the conflict into 'a reality show', with the rebels as actors. I wonder if today, as Dalli's 'actors' have wrenched back their country from a tyrant's bloodied cluthes, he still thinks it is all a reality show. Maybe the empty Gaddafi compound is just a deserted TV set. And perhaps the green regime is still real in Dalli's mind.

The EU commissioner then proceeded to regale us with his portrait of Gaddafi. The Libyan leader was making an "assessment" of the people and it was he who had magnanimously made the first move towards reconcilation, chips in the Qormi boy. You'd think we are looking at a portrait of a visionary statesman whose thoughts and actions are awe inspiring. A Churchill, a Roosevelt or a de Gaulle, not a megalomaniacal dictator with a bad haircut and permanently in carnival clothes.

Worst of all, rather than condemn Gaddafi's state-sponsored violence and praise the rebels for defending themselves against it, Dalli had placed them on the same footing. Gaddafi is protecting his own, just like the rebels, he says. KMB's pro-Gaddafi rantings are just around the corner from Dalli's 'analysis'.

Today, as Gaddafi is on the run, it is such a pleasure to note that the John Dalli Reality Show has been taken off the air, never to return to our screens again.