Quote from another section of the media: " The Labour Party has slammed today’s edition of the Nationalist Party’s newspaper il-Mument for having “recycled a blatant lie that had been categorically denied by the government last Sunday”."

What they were slamming is the ongoing story about how Mr Louis Grech will be resigning from his Deputy Leadership position and how Dr Manwel Mallia will be politely shunted from the position in which he is perceived as making gaffe after gaffe to one on which the "kicked upstairs" hat can conveniently be hung.

I hope the story is untrue, because it is predicated by Louis Grech having personal reasons that no-one should have. Grech is not a bad sort and I hope he will go from strength to strength in his current position. I also hope that Manwel Mallia will not be rewarded by a promotion for his Ministry's performance, that would be too much.

Whether the story is true or not, it beats me, however, what inspired the people who matter within the MLP (don't anyone tell me those aren't the right initials) to link a denial of the story to saying that the PN’s leader Simon Busuttil is managing to do much worse than his predecessor.

“He not only has a bankrupt printing press but is also making a mockery of the PN’s media which explains why the employees of the printing press who were made redundant are so angry at him,” the MLP said.

The non sequitor is colossal: the journalists may, or may not, have come up with a story that is untrue, or true, but how the sorry state of the PN's finances comes into it is completely beyond me. Don't get me wrong, the business side of the equation is as important as the journalistic one, but there is no connection between them.

Well, actually, I'm wrong. Given that for your average MLP-biased target audience, which the media "experts" within the MLP no doubt believe is the majority of the country, as long as a story is negative to the PN, it's a good story, you can see where they're coming from.

For the rest of us, however, the weak denial and utter irrelevance of the defence ploy perversely gives the story legs.