That was a changed Prime Minister speaking in Parliament last week on the Malliagate debacle, which left him terribly bruised. It was the real Joseph Muscat coming across and it does not bode well for any of us.

Incredibly, he started off describing Malta as a maturing democracy, as if he and the Labour Party he leads had anything to do with it. Anyone who’s been around for half a century remembers full well the Golden Years of Labour and that democracy never fitted in their equation; slowly, democracy is not fitting into Muscat’s new Labour’s equation either.

Having lost the plot and control of the political agenda, Muscat is feeling very uncomfortable with democracy, most especially with press freedom and leaks to the press from the police control room.

Malta, he told Parliament in his introduction, wants to be “truly European”. That is offensive. Malta is European and that too is no thanks to him and his party. Being European is all about a set of values, human rights being foremost among them. That’s not what Muscat thinks.

When his Education Minister crassly compared the Nationalist Party’s reform efforts to restoring a hymen, Muscat’s flippant reply when asked what he thought of that analogy was that “we’re European”. This man, believe it or not, is our Prime Minister.

Bad taste does not make you European. Tolerance of bad taste makes you European but Muscat does not understand the difference and is in no mood for tolerance either. That dream is over.

Environment Minister Leo Brincat frankly admitted that the last weeks were possibly the most difficult in the currently legislature. It was not a trigger-happy driver of a minister that caused that or the Prime Minister’s absolute inability to do the obvious and sack an incompetent minister. It was PN leader Simon Busuttil’s ability to dominate the political agenda that truly rattled the government.

Labour of old is back with a vengeance. This is Dom Mintoff all over again

The last weeks have shown what Busuttil can do with a reinvigorated party. Busuttil ran Muscat ragged. The gloves are off and it is now a street brawl.

Playing the humble, Muscat said he learnt a lot from the Mallia meltdown. After nearly two years in government, this country has had enough of a Prime Minister permanently on a learning curve. He just failed the test and that is all there is know.

Cornered, feeling the heat, and knowing no other way, Muscat tried to turn the tables on Busuttil and said, come January, he will be coming up with a test for Busuttil every month. He apparently has some scandals up his sleeve dating back to that ever-receding Nationalist government and intends to release them strategically, to keep the PN on the back foot. How original of him.

Busuttil’s cool reply was ‘bring it on’. He said he would not put up with Muscat’s schoolyard bullying tactics. It is exactly the way to deal with Bully Beefs, to stand up to them. It scares them.

To deflect from Malliagate, Muscat came up with the Valenzia inquiry into the death of an immigrant at the detention centre. His target was former PN minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici. Barely anyone today remembers that the low-profile Mifsud Bonnici was ever a minister but everyone remembers Mallia and his driver.

The problem for Muscat is that the Valenzia inquiry has been kept under wraps for around two years, during most of which he was Prime Minister. Muscat couldn’t have made a worse choice.

Eight human rights NGOs slammed the government for leaving that report to gather dust and doing nothing about it.

“We cannot hesitate to express a serious condemnation of every single person who read this report, failed to act and chose to remain silent,” the NGOs said. They recalled how, in the wake of the immigrant’s death, the PN government had begun a review process on the treatment of asylum seekers. That review was stopped when Labour came to power.

And now, nearly two years later, the Prime Minister tables in Parliament a report on the horrendous death of an immigrant, not to improve the lot of those sad people in our midst but for political gain.

The NGOs said: “His violent death could and should have been avoided. This further shaming of his dignity could and should have been also avoided.”

There is no dignity when you have an amoral government, which last year wanted to implement a push back policy in the face of international condemnation. No wonder Labour had no problem in sending PN reject Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando to represent it on that rowdy TV chat show Xarabank. He is still advocating the push back policy.

Muscat is desperate to again take control of the political agenda. Yes, he has learnt his lesson from Malliagate and he said so much in Parliament. It was the release of the police control room recordings that broke the camel’s back, drew public scorn and forced him to let Mallia go.

People, he said, are having doubts on the privacy afforded to them when making reports to the police. In fact, Muscat went on, they were having doubts about their privacy on anything to do with government entities because “restricted information was passed on to a political party”. We all know what that means: a clampdown and a witch-hunt is underway.

Good luck, whistleblowers.

This is a sign of Labour to come, a throwback to Labour of old. In order to leave no doubt as to which direction this country is heading, the Labour government last week signed an agreement with the communist Chinese government (Shanghai Electric Power is just a smokescreen) selling them a third of the national power company.

It is amazing how, at the signing, the chiefs of Shanghai Electric and its mother company, China Power Investment, could not contain themselves and kept referring to their purchase of part of a bankrupt Maltese energy company as a their “first step in Europe”.

With Malta a willing doormat, they have their eyes on investing in renewable energy around Europe, for which read selling solar panels. No wonder they had no problem in accepting that the government would be under no obligation to buy energy from the BWSC they should be turning into a gas-powered plant. They probably couldn’t care less, like they don’t care much for the much-vaunted agreement of fixed energy price for five years which, alas, our Energy Minister could not tell us how much it will cost.

Our only consolation is that both the Shanghai Electric chairman and the China Power Investment president wished us a merry Christmas at the signing. That atheist Chinese government would probably call it soft diplomacy.

Somehow, it leaves you with a sick feeling that you’re just being fooled.

Labour of old is back with a vengeance. This is Dom Mintoff all over again. Instead of Nicolae Ceaucescu and Kim Il-sung, Muscat has found other undemocratic allies. He was off to Azerbaijan on a mission shrouded in mystery as a billionaire Saudi prince turned up unexpectedly last Saturday to get a Republic Day honour for reasons no one understands.

It was exactly like this under Mintoff, who treated Malta as a fiefdom and personalised foreign policy like the monarchs of old, with his talk of Chinese friends and Libyan cousins. Like Mintoff, Muscat likes to reach secret agreements.

The most recent to come to light, through the PN media, is a memorandum of understanding with another Chinese communist-owned company, COVEC, on a monorail. COVEC could benefit from EU funds, just like it did some years ago in Poland, where it won a major project but then failed to deliver and dropped out halfway through.

Meanwhile, we’re all set to start welcoming total strangers, waving a Maltese passport at the airport, with only talent to declare to the baffled Customs officers. Why does everything about Labour have to be so shady?

The worst is still to come. The years ahead shall be bloody and all we can do is hope that it would not be literally bloody. Secrecy breeds corruption and corruption breeds violence. Some of us have been through that trauma before. It was not nice. People lived in fear.