Let me do what I promised myself and be as objective as possible about the PL in Government. Let me in fact be a bit more than that and promise, on my word of honour, that I will be lenient and try to close a few thousand eyes in my analysis. This being their honeymoon of sorts I have to accept a degree of fumbling and also a few bad moves.

I can try hard to be ultra-objective and be even more forgiving than Pope Francis and Saint Francis rolled into one but I just end up being stumped when I hear that we’ve given super spots to be occupied by Franco Debono and Anġlu Farrugia.

Let’s start with the lawyer from Għaxaq. Even if he is the brightest star in the legal firmament—which I seriously doubt—did Joseph Muscat not have any idea what this meant to the PN and the majority of its supporters? If we call a spade a spade we end up saying thatFranco was the star in the Labour Party’s camp. They egged him on, they made him seem the most important whipper of sorts of the PN. Franco insistently attacked Gonzi and all the ones around him. He was even sent to represent the Labour Party in a debate. Even if the man made sense, his methods and his agitation served no one but the Labour Party. He was constantly destabilising the Government which, granted had not been voted in with a big majority, but voted in by the people it had been.

Franco was like the best football player I remember at school. He wanted to shine all the time and most of the time he did, but when things did not come his way he screamed, he hollered and he stamped his feet and usually ended up ruining our game. Stars with no loyalty and who cannot accept team spirit wreak more damage than dullards at the game.

Joseph Muscat’s message with the appointment of Franco is obviously meant as another turn of the knife in the PN body that lies practically knocked out senseless—if not dead—on the ground. The smile on Joseph’s face when turning the blade turns into a grin, a satisfied grin of ħudu ġo fikom (take that you vermin).

This surely is not the new wave of politics we were expecting.

And now Anġlu Farrugia has been appointed as Speaker of the House. If the man is a lawyer—and maybe another shooting star—I care little. He is hardly the right man to occupy one of the top seats in Malta. If he was unfit to remain deputy leader of the PL for his utterances about a member of the judiciary, how is he now washed clean of this sin and rewarded by the ever-generous Joseph Muscat?

Politics is always great fun to comment about—but let’s try to stop deriding our most important institutions just to win a few silly, scary points.