I know Manwel Mallia personally and I know he is supremely comfortable with English and Maltese and that he is more than capable of employing either language to perfection.

Consequently, when he says he is not embarrassed by the contents of the reports he has been sitting on for months, that he is not delaying their publication, that he has nothing to hide, he is perfectly aware that between the literal meaning of his words and our perception of the true import of the facts, there is a gaping chasm.

That Minister Chris Cardona fails to see the supreme irony in his saying that he did not interfere with the report relating to the grant of casino licences but simply prevented its publication is - sadly - perhaps unsurprising, but for Minister Mallia to adopt this "words, who cares?" posture is disappointing, if I might be allowed to adopt an Anglo-Saxonism in the vein of the PM, whose whole Cabinet seems to have forgotten that words have meanings, such is the gay abandon with which they use them.

Mallia has many, many questions to answer, as does his PM. In fact, the latter now has to answer a question that has been perplexing us on the outside looking in for many, many months now.

Why is Mallia still a minister?

Avid readers of political thrillers, as I am, can fantasise all they like about Mallia knowing where the bodies are buried or about his cashing in a great big favour from pre-election days, but these are just that, fantasies. The problem with fantasies, though, is that they just won't go away until someone comes up with the facts, the lance that slays all ghostly shadows.

In the meantime, scurrilous writers like me can have fun joining together testimony in Parliament with snide innuendos and a few handy facts, to conjure up a stupendously convoluted, but entirely fictional, tapestry that has as its centre-piece a hero like our hero, with his claws on the strings of the three essential organs that any self-respecting South American or North African revolutionary craves: the police, the army and broadcasting.

But apart from the burning question why our man is still the PM's man, there are other questions that today need a clear answer, and urgently.

What's a minister's driver doing with a loaded gun? Never mind that he used it, that's something for internal affairs to sort out, if they're allowed to. Never mind that he used it because someone scratched his car and never mind that he was in plain clothes and in no conceivable way protecting his minister's body, which was miles away. Why would a minister's driver ever be running around with a gun? What's he defending him from? Loaded parliamentary questions, for heaven's sake?

There's more. Have there ever been concealed weapons in parliament? Do all ministers' drivers carry concealed weapons? Do they sit comfortably in the stranger's gallery with a piece in their tight belts?

Answers, please, Dr Mallia, and super pronto, if you would be so kind.

While you're about it, could you also please let us know why your ministry, which you say is not involved in this matter, it being a matter for the police (true enough) is actually involved up to its scrawny neck, including issuing press statements in the dead of night that seem as fictional as my own little flight of fancy above?

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