I'm so glad the PM is going to sleep well.

When PMs don't sleep well, it means we have something to worry about, because either there's something on his mind that affects us or he's been sitting up concocting some fresh legislative horror with which to make our lives less pleasant.

So when we had a panoply of the Great and Good of the Government, with assorted Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, ordinary members and such ranging themselves behind the PM and his lectern in the Palace for the portentous announcement that prescription has been abolished for corruption crimes committed by politicians, his announcement that this makes him sleep easy was doubly welcome.

It meant that there was nothing worrying him, all was well with the world, and it meant that although it seems to have taken a good third of the Cabinet to do it, all we were being told that was new was that corrupt politicians can't hide behind the clock.This is all well and good, or rather bad, for the politicians, but for your common-or-garden member of the Great Unwashed, such as Yours Truly, it doesn't really make cold or make hot, to use an Italian phrase Googly-translated.

I'm not, and never have been, a politician (to say nothing of never having given or taken a bribe, but that's not the point) and - taking it as a given that the law will work - any amount of sleaze-money recovered from any amount of corrupt politicians will make not an iota of difference to the amount of my money the Revenue will try to nick.

The Government had to pass this law, of course, because it was a major plank in josephmuscat.com's campaign. The extent to which it will work is, however, debatable, and then some. I haven't read it, so I won't comment about the technicalities, for all that they will be interesting to check out.

For instance, are we talking about criminal prescription only, in which case many dead parrots will be immune anyway, or are we talking about civil prescription as well, meaning that the estates of said dead parrots might start feeling the heat?

And how far back is the removal of prescription going to stretch? Is it coincidentally going to take into account only PN-Government years (many as they have been, which is not Joseph Muscat's fault)?

But as I said, these are technicalities, the real reasons why the law won't work lie precisely within the meaning of the word "real". How many cases of "real" corruption have there been? I'm no starry-eyed ingenue, I'm sure there have been a few, but realistically, how many prosecutions are going to be looking at, in the real world?

And, realistically, how reliable is the evidence going to be, so many years later?

This all leaves aside the Constitutional issues that are no doubt going to be raised, mainly related to the retro-active nature of the law, which is a minefield of Human Rights issues, especially in the Criminal Law field. As it has often been put, something (the electorate was dazzled into thinking) needed to be done about corruption, this was something and Joseph Muscat did it.