I’m writing this at some ungodly hour on Thursday morning, so forgive me if my coherence is even less evident than usual.

This is because Wednesday evening saw us first attending the Baroque Festival and then having a very good celebratory dinner at the Black Pig, at the lower end of Old Bakery.

As you read this, the festival still has a number of events on, so you need to seek out some tickets and go. You forget about the barbarians at the gate and the wolves at the door, so good is this festival.

So Malta is for everyone is it, according to Joseph Muscat. He has come up with this pretty slogan as part of his bid to be the youngest to trip daintily up the steps to Castille.

More than most slogans, it has a hollow ring.

A couple of examples will make this hollowness ring loudly.

Lino Farrugia Sacco, a sitting judge, has filed a constitutional application by means of which he has asked the court to order retired judge Victor Caruana Colombo and the president of the Chamber of Advocates, Reuben Balzan, to remove themselves from the Commission for the Administration of Justice while it deliberates on the matter of his impeachment.

In the case of Balzan, the request for his removal appears to be predicated on his friendship with Simon Busuttil, his activities on the political front and his membership of a law firm that perfectly legitimately bears the name of a Nationalist minister.

In the case of Caruana Colombo, his sin appears to be that he is the Government’s nominee on the Commission and he was a member of the Commission when it had originally drawn the attention of Farrugia Sacco to the incompatibility of his judicial office with his activities within the Malta Olympic Committee, a clearer case of ‘we told you so’, incidentally, being difficult to find.

Farrugia Sacco seems to believe, you have to conclude, that if you are perceivable as having an inconvenient political opinion (obviously, inconvenient from his point of view) you are not fit to sit in judgment of him.

The integrity, for which I am proud to vouch, knowing them both well enough, of the two objects of his disaffection is as nothing to him, they are ‘feelthy nats’ and they have to go. The one that should go is Farrugia Sacco himself, with his inappropriate cracks about the Prime Minister trying to make people laugh and his association, innocent as he claims it to be, with an episode that does nothing to enhance the country’s image. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen, he hasn’t even had the savoir faire to desist from hearing cases while his case is considered by the Commission.

Consider, if you will, Konrad Tuesday, when we had the ineffable pleasure of being able to watch that Konrad Mizzi fellow, well groomed and polished as he is (until the cracks started showing, that is), wall-to-wall, as it were.

I only watched him on Bondì+ when he made it pretty darn clear that he was fading under the constant pummelling he was getting from Tonio Fenech, who went from strength to strength while Mizzi chucked “maa, you’re really rude” at him and dropped gems in English (quite clearly lifted wholesale from his crib sheets) with desperate grittiness, trying to win over the middle ground.

From where I’m sitting, people just aren’t getting his cunning plan to convince us that Joseph Muscat will lower electricity and, maybe, water prices and Mizzi seems to be feeling this.

In his zeal to shore up Labour’s tottering warhorse, Mizzi adopted what will henceforth be known as the ‘Farrugia Sacco Gambit’, tarring anyone who doesn’t agree with his theories as a political opponent whose integrity, opinions and technical expertise are therefore valueless, if not downright malicious.

He tried to pull this, for instance, with Anne Fenech, an authority in the maritime sphere, and Chris Ciantar, whose credentials are certainly ever so slightly stronger than Mizzi’s own. But, you see, Malta is for everyone, which, in Muscat’s world, seems to mean being ready to jump on his gaily decorated bandwagon, in its headlong rush towards those steps.

No matter that your credentials are suspect at best (check out recent editions of my blog if you want some chapter and verse) you are guaranteed the red carpet being rolled out while if you happen to be perceived as sitting on the wrong side of the fence, your expertise is worthless, fit only for Mizzi, an IT expert turned Superman, knowledgeable about everything, with a burst of English jargon to prove it.

If Muscat gets to be made Prime Minister, he’ll have to make Mizzi Minister for Everything and slot everyone else in under him as parliamentary secretaries.

And if the Lil’Elves and Peculiar Pundits – whose comments are proof positive in themselves of the way Muscat’s bunch see anyone of a differing opinion – think I’m avoiding the Standard and Poor’s downgrade, unlike them, I’ve read it.

Great it isn’t but it’s a darn sit better than it could have been and that’s no thanks to Muscat and his political opportunism.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20