My problem is that numbers make my teeth itch and my brain hurt, so when a story comes up that talks about this or that many thousands being on one side or another of an equation, I tend to go into a coma and ignore it.

That is what happened when I first saw the story where the Minister of Finance, Prof. Edward Scicluna, was defending his Government, the one that pays him peanuts but expects him not to be a monkey, unlike his Ministerial colleague George Vella, who when he doesn’t want a monkey, doesn’t pay peanuts, about public sector employment.

Scicluna, defending his Government as I said, had declared that the rise in public sector employment about which the Nasty Nats were making such a fuss was simply due to a reclassification of a bunch of rude mechanicals, from what I recall in the construction sector, being re-classified into the public sector. Presumably, though as I say, numbers do tend to make my eyes glaze over, what he meant was that these people were in gainful employment in one area and have now been described as being in another, one which brings them into the “public sector employment” category.

This would rather tend to deflate the Opposition’s argument that the Government, the Labour-controlled Government, was packing its ranks with warm bodies in order to take the edge off the rise in unemployment, traditionally a symptom of an economy that is not going great guns, itself traditionally a sign that the country is blessed with a Labour Government. There are usually other signs that Labour are in charge, such as problems in the medical field, education going through spasms, the environment being raped and such like, but they do seem to have a knack of buggering up the economy, and this is the area for which Scicluna is responsible.

So when he came out with his defence of the rise in public sector employment, it was all good, from his point of view, and it made - or more precisely, he hoped it made - the Nationalists look like twerps, getting it wrong.

The snag is, again from Scicluna’s point of view, is that this very morning the Chief Number Cruncher, or to give him his more formal title, the Head of the National Statistics Office, has poured more than an ice-bucket over Sicicluna’s claim, pointing out that the reason the Minister gave for the apparent rise in public sector employment is incorrect, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that notwithstanding what the Minister said was not the case turns out to be the case.

No-one, of course, is accusing Scicluna of lying or verbal prestidigitation or craven spinning: he is, after all, an economist who is paid peanuts so he can’t be blamed for coming out with this sort of thing, which you can call, for example, an alternative representation of the facts portrayed by the numbers, if you like. You can call it many other things, but then you might be accused of accusing the Minister, which you might wish to do but I certainly couldn’t.

For instance, if you were a former leader of the Labour Party, you might say that you are morally convinced that the Minister was this or that or the other, which would allow you to squirm out of a libel charge because all you are reporting is your opinion of the Minister.

All I know is, in a normal country, when a Minister of Finance comes out with a categoric statement which is denied categorically by a very senior man, either the Minister or the senior man gets called to order right quickly.

Any guesses as to what will happen here?