Paul Caruana Galizia: ‘My mother was the centre of our family’

Paul Caruana Galizia was at a friend’s house in Notting Hill when he received the news he realised he had been dreading his whole life. His brother called from their family home in Malta to tell him their mother had been killed — a bomb had been placed under her car.

“I felt outside my body, like I was looking down at myself from the ceiling,” says Paul, a slim man in a moss green jumper who speaks with remarkable poise about what his family is contending with. “I don’t know how I managed it, but I cycled home to Stockwell and caught the next flight I could to Malta. My two older brothers and dad met me at the airport. I had a never-ending splitting headache for days, I barely ate or slept — you feel everything is a waste of time.”

Paul had always known his mother was different. Daphne Caruana Galizia was the first woman to write a political column in Malta. She earned a reputation as a one-woman Wiki-Leaks, fearlessly investigating neo-Nazis, drug traffickers and political corruption, and facing death threats for her stories.

On her blog, Running Commentary, she reported how she went through the Panama Papers and discovered offshore wealth allegedly linked to the then Maltese Prime Minister’s inner circle. The last words she typed on the day she died, October 16, 2017, were: “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”

“Growing up it was weird enough to have a mother who worked — all my friends’ mothers were housewives — let alone one like her,” says Paul. “It was as if there was only one person in Malta called Daphne — you’d hear her name on the news and know it was her. Everyone in my family worried about her, but it felt wrong to even ask her to stop writing.  

“She tried to shield us — I was six when the first arson attack happened and she said she’d dropped a candle; when our dogs were killed she said they had eaten poison. We grew up with threats, so in a way you are prepared for it, it’s within the realms of the possible, but it still shocks you. My mother was 53, she was the centre of our family. Suddenly we had to reconfigure. I had to go to the morgue and give a DNA sample because they couldn’t identify her.”

In December 2017, three people were accused of being hitmen and arrested over her death, but there was no investigation of what was behind it. They have all pleaded not guilty. “My brother Andrew said it was like arresting the bomb,” says Paul. 

The family still haven’t grieved. Instead they have been consumed by a fight for justice. They’ve also set up the investigative journalism organisation The Daphne Project to continue her work.

Before Daphne was killed she had been investigating a story which claimed that a senior cabinet minister, Konrad Mizzi, and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, had opened shell companies registered in Panama. She was investigating alleged payments to Mizzi and Schembri. Mizzi and Schembri deny these payments, and any wrongdoing. 

In November last year, Yorgen Fenech, one of Malta’s richest businessmen, was eventually charged with complicity in Daphne’s murder. He has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing. But it was a turning point for Daphne’s family. Paul says they are still discovering “how right my mother was”. 

There is also a case in France, where Fenech owns hotels and a racing stable, looking into whether he made payments to Maltese aides and ministers. And last month Joseph Muscat, the Maltese Prime Minister, resigned. Paul is lukewarm about his successor, Robert Abela. “Muscat wanted him. The biggest test will be if Muscat is properly prosecuted.” 

Paul asked the UK foreign office to publicly support the call for a public inquiry into Daphne’s death. “They said they were working behind the scenes but they used the Maltese government’s line that it would interfere with the investigation. Individual MPs have been supportive, including Jess Phillips and Andrew Mitchell.”

“I’ve made my job about my mother,” says Paul, who left a position at a think tank to become a journalist at Tortoise Media. Now he has made a four-part podcast to find out the truth behind his mother’s murder. “I would like the podcast to humanise my mother,” he says. “In the last 10 years of her life she was robbed of her personality and humanity; called a witch, a whore; harassed. She used to love swimming in the sea but she couldn’t because it wasn’t safe for her to be outside. The whole thing upset her a lot but she would never talk to us about it, she never complained.”

Recordings of Daphne feature on the podcast, and this was the first time Paul had heard his mother’s voice since she died. “I found that really difficult,” he says. “I told the producer to take over that bit as I couldn’t keep listening. I haven’t listened to the podcast yet — I find it too much — but my family say it’s good. The hardest thing to deal with is there is no end. I don’t know if we have ever grieved because we were just kicked into this battle straight away. I need to force myself not to think about it sometimes so we don’t exhaust ourselves, but I don’t think we’re good at that — it dominates our lives.” 

Daphne was a reserved woman who liked reading. She decided she wanted to be a journalist aged 19 in 1984 after being attacked by a policeman and detained for 24 hours at a protest about religious schools being shut down. “For her this was a turning point — she left thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ ” She met Paul’s father, a lawyer who is now 63, at a bar and Paul jokes, “She thought he was a creep for approaching her”. 

Paul says she was the one who looked after him and his brothers. “For a lot of people in Malta it was strange to imagine her as a mother, but that’s what she was for us. We would have fights, go out to eat, she’d nag us about our clothes and girlfriends. She was the one who took us to school, made our lunches. She cooked these homemade burgers. 

“She wasn’t strict about most things, but she was about how if we messed up at school we’d pay for it with boring jobs. I remember her telling us, ‘Get out of Malta while you still can because things are only going to get worse’.” Did she ever consider leaving? “She had a big emotional investment in the country and thought she shouldn’t have to leave.” Later, when Paul came to London to study at LSE in 2009 and stayed, marrying an English woman called Jessica, Daphne was a regular visitor. She liked Soho and Columbia Road Flower Market. 

The last time Paul saw her was when he went to see her in Malta in July 2017. Before that she had come to Stockwell at Easter. “She bought us two hortensia flowers which we still have, and a bottle of wine I haven’t opened.”

What would Paul say to people who want to visit Malta? “Think quite critically about the country and how it is being governed.”

Paul’s grandparents went to every one of the trials of the case, sitting, he says, “closer to Fenech than I am to you today”. “He was 35 when my mother was murdered. He was rich, married, with two young children. He had everything, yet there he was on a Saturday night, completely alone, about to be charged with complicity in a murder.” 

But the arrest has given Paul hope. “On the anniversary of my mother’s death last year there was a vigil in Malta. The mood was different, more energised. For the first time since she died it doesn’t feel like we are coming up against a wall. You either feel sorry about it, stay at home and cry and despair, or you keep campaigning. We have to push every lever we can.”

The four-part special of the Tortoise Podcast is available to listen on Apple and Spotify.