Not content with rendering our passport an international joke, our Prime Minister seems hell bent on doing the same with our honours system.

Let's make it very clear: Gaia Cauchi seems to be a delightful young girl, with a good voice and a bright future in entertainment. I'm happy (for her) that she won the Junior Eurovision in the country that has just turned its back on Europe, and I hope she goes from strength to strength, onward and upward and all that.

But please, can we just have a reality check here and come down to earth?

A quick Google confirms that Joseph Calleja has not yet achieved the heights to which Muscat has raised Ms Cauchi with his populist gesture of decreeing that she should be awarded Gieh ir-Repubblika. I might be wrong, as Google is not the Acme Depository of All Knowledge, but typing in "Joseph Calleja Gieh Repubblika" returned, ironically, references to Gaia Cauchi but no reference to Calleja being given what many, including myself, would say would be a very well-deserved honour.

Just as a parenthesis, there were rumblings in the blogosphere late Monday evening that it was a different honour that Muscat meant to bestow but he got confused, poor lamb, tripping over himself in his eagerness to tag on to Ms Cauchi's coat-tails. It would be nice if someone could clarify whether this is the case and also tell us precisely at what time the Cabinet met to decide on this momentous award.

So there we have it: a young child who didn't even know what Gieh ir-Repubblika means is enrolled in the ranks of its recipients by a Prime Minister who seems to have come to the conclusion that, indeed, L'Etat c'est Moi (pardon my French)

Parliamentary Secretary Owen Bonnici must be a touch red in the face this morning: on Monday he was lambasting the Opposition's (entirely justified) objections to the widening of the net when it comes to awarding national honours. Just to prove them right, his Lord and Master blithely hands out a gong to a kid and, to make it even worse, "her whole team" (something that seems to have slipped under the wire)

Is it one medal to be sliced up like a pizza amongst the team, or a set of medals, like a tray of pastizzi?