Prof. Kevin Aquilina responded, if not in so many words, but in many words, to my question "why do we need a new Constitution".

He left one word out: convention. I don't mean the Constitutional Convention which that lawyer from Ghaxaq has been charged in gratitude with co-ordinating. That "event" will trundle along, hopefully with the PN refusing to have anything to do with it while Debono is within a barge-pole of it, given his manifest unsuitability for the job and the unworthy motives that many, including me, have identified as under-pinning his nomination by the PM.

The extent to which Dr Muscat will regret nailing his colours to Debono's mast remains to be seen but the early signs are there. From co-ordinating, Debono has already, at least in popular perception, moved to chairing, from which it is but a hop, skip and a jump to authoring and, at least in his own mind, enacting the Constitution of the Second (Third or Fourth, really, but who's counting?) Republic.

The "convention" to which I refer is not, however, Debono's ego-tripper. It is, rather, a concept that tends to escape the more positivist. Incidentally, do please distinguish "positivist" from "positive" - the latter is a frame of mind that allows thinking, the former tends more towards preventing it, preferring the law to define everything.

The archetype of "conventional" (I use the word imprecisely, you might think) constitutions is that of the United Kingdom. Vast swathes of it depend on the undefined - perhaps undefinable - dynamic between the four estates, the Executive, the Legislature, the Judiciary and - for want of a better word - the Social, given expression by the media.

This lack of written definition is the despair of positivists, those who want to be able to run their finger up and down the Table of Contents, seeking out the minutiae of written law, handy pegs on which to hang their hats without having to do too much thinking.

It is the sort of activity that so appeals to barrack-room lawyers, the ones who gleefully seize on a narrow wording of the law to defeat an argument that is self-evidently good. It is the frame of mind that allowed the Constitutional Court, for example, to sanction a blatant breach of human rights because the Enemalta Act, under which regulations were made in the mid-Eighties to prevent the PN disseminating information, was not itself un-Constitutional.

The vast majority of tweaks that Prof. Aquilina listed as reasons to have a new Constitution are not reasons to have one at all: they are instead instances of where, quite clearly, the appropriate use of 'conventional' thinking is necessary. The problem is, we have a dearth of denizens of the Fourth Estate who could even identify a 'convention', much less demand its adoption.

In fact, they wouldn't recognise one if it was served up garnished with water-cress, such is their slavish adherence to the culture of rehashing press releases and not questioning Is this the fault of the Constitution?

Hardly.