Premier Joseph Muscat’s pretty little handcart trundles on, oblivious to notions of reticent governance or respect for propriety, brimming with slogans, sound bites and surrealism.

Starting pretty much at random, his favourite minister, the one whose wife is handily doing a Scarlet Pimpernel in her home country and being paid many, many of our euros for doing that, gets astride his high horse and lambasts the Nationalist Party for the alleged mess in the structure at Mater Dei Hospital.

By the time you read this, of course, the report on the findings of the inquiry, headed by former judge Philip Sciberras, on the whole thing might have been published and we’ll know whether there is such a major issue at hand after all. Given that the Konrad Mizzi, Premier Joseph’s clear favourite (for now, anyway) has been making a right old hoohah about it, I suppose it’s pretty safe to say that the former judge will be reporting that the structure is not in a good shape.

That’s as may be and it will be interesting to see who supplied the materials and who certified them as being OK and whether anyone at the political helm at the time had any interest in trying to shield anyone from the eventual consequences, even way back then. It’s all conjecture, anyway, and the rules of the game require that responsibility is taken by whoever needs to take it, which is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious and a bit.

If a whistleblower lies, he’s not a whistleblower, he’s a liar and the law doesn’t protect liars

On the other hand, though, the rules of democracy require that honourable ministers do not try to muddy the waters and chuck mud around with gay abandon by making a veritable Everest about something that is not even a molehill, merely a handy little lump of mud.

It’s to Mizzi’s obsessive screeching and squawking about contracts being “hidden” in safes to which I refer, a peg on which the dear fellow has tried, ludicrously, to hang his “Blame Simon Busuttil” hat.

Mizzi’s logic, if one can grace it with that name, is that the famous contract was in a safe and for this the Foundation for Medical Services’ ex- (and the PN’s current) CEO is to be blamed, therefore Busuttil is to blame for the concrete not being up to scratch.

Excuse me? Quite apart from the state of the concrete, about which others who know more about this sort of thing can have their say, what in the name of all that’s beautiful is wrong with an important contract being put in a safe? And how is the ex-CEO being “blamed” for this when it wasn’t even his safe in the first place?

Mizzi, like Premier Muscat, his boss, seems to think he can say what he likes, when he likes, how he likes and hang all considerations of accuracy, relevance and materiality. Mizzi’s problem, though, is that we’re starting to see through him and the view is of a minister whose portfolio is coming apart at the seams.

Another honourable minister whose grasp of the fundamentals of his brief is not as strong as he might want us to believe is Owen Bonnici, who came over all horrified of late at Busuttil’s declarations that the Gozitan whistleblower was, not to put too fine a point on it, blowing bubbles that were full of very much less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

According to Bonnici, and according to the one-trick pony who got herself elected on Labour’s ticket after her success, for which I take my hat off to her, in getting divorce onto the statute books, as well as according to Labour’s philosopher on tap, Toni Abela, gainsaying a whistleblower who you think has lied about you is an attack on the very fundamentals of democracy and undermines the whole concept, and value, of having a whistleblower system in place.

Sorry to disillusion you, guys, but implying that the whistleblower has taken on papal-like attributes (infallibility, for those who have forgotten their catechism) simply because he convinced whoever he needed to that his story was worth telling doesn’t, in and of itself, quite wash. In words of as few syllables as possible, if a whistleblower lies, he’s not a whistleblower, he’s a liar and the law doesn’t protect liars.

Words, however prettily arranged and tweaked, don’t make a university, either.

The Premier Joseph Muscat “University” of Żonqoria might want to be called a university, and its entrepreneurial promoters, who seem to have done a Henley & Whosit on Premier Muscat and harnessed his superb selling skills in their interests, are fairly gasping for this to be the case but unless they can show the people who count that they have the academic credentials to be called a university, they simply will not be allowed to do that little thing.

The people who sit in judgement are not, incidentally, Premier Muscat and his Education Minister, thankfully, but people who have their own intellectual and academic reputations on the line: headed by co-columnist Martin Scicluna, they have to assess the application being made by the Jordanian property magnate and come to a conclusion about whether his business plan has legs as an academic nonpareil. The business side is A-OK, he’s getting a nice chunk of virgin land for free.

I’m pretty sure they won’t let De Paul University’s breathless prose about their curriculum finding resonance in Catholic Malta influence their judgement, especially since the market for places at the Premier Muscat “University” doesn’t exactly brim over with adherents to the Catholic faith. Nor will they, I surmise, find themselves to be overly-impressed by Her Excellency Gina Abercombie Winstanley’s endorsements, given that the dear lady seems to have a penchant for endorsing most things that Premier Muscat promotes.

Someone else who seems to think that just because he says something, it becomes imbued with inherent value is the chairman of Valletta 18. He must think this, why else would he have made such a fuss on Twitter, pretty pictures and all, of a rather nondescript event, the installation of a cultural hot-spot mobile unit (snappy name, that)?

I can just see culture vultures Europe-wide dropping everything and stampeding to their nearest travel agent to book a seat on Air Malta’s rapidly diminishing fleet, to come here to try out Jason Micallef’s mobile hotspot cultural thingy. I suppose he’ll be streaming one of his critiques of Malta’s Eurovision participation on a never-ending loop.

While on the subject of hi-tec awesomeness and general marvellousness, did you spot Minister Evarist Bartolo’s valiant defence of the Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando fellow a few days ago?

Heroically throwing a lowly employee to the wolves, Bartolo let it be known that Pullicino Orlando is worth every penny of his princely salary as executive chair of the Malta Council for Science and Technology because, you see, he doesn’t have to be actually in the office to perform the functions of his office.

Presumably, this is because Pullicino Orlando is a multi-tasker extraordinaire, able to inject botox with his left, yank a rotten molar with his right and conduct remote meetings with his minions at the MCST using Siri and other means of voice-command, all at the same time.

A new place for you to try out, this week, and in Malta, for a change. We celebrated, very belatedly (it’s a tradition, you see) the birthday of one of our number last week and we tried out L’Agape, in Rabat – the more southern one, of course. It’s a small place, just behind the main church, in a rather neatly groomed part of town and the food and service are well worth the visit and then some.

imbocca@gmail.com

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