I’m never sure whether this country is real or if we are living in a warped spoof of ourselves. In these trying times, in these horrid times where innocent lives are being lost throughout the globe, where everyone is at risk, we indulge in idiocy beyond compare here on this rock.

Practically at the same time as a hotel in Mali was being stormed by terrorists, most of us were reading what Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici (KMB) was spouting merrily away about  Isis (or IS or Daesh or whatever they are called).

In a nutshell the former Prime Minister of these blessed isles said that if we, as a country, help France we should also help IS. This while another terrorist group like the one KMB wants us to treat on a par with France was killing a number of innocents. I know that what KMB said sounds like a madman’s rant—in fact a nuttier piece of rubbish is hard to contemplate.

But I am sorry to say that, whether he is a doddering old man or not, I do not for a second think he is mad.

Just as he was not mad when he led the Labour Party and took us to the verge of collapse; just as he was not mad when he tried hard to destroy private schools; just as he was not mad when he let our national broadcaster spiral down to the worst excesses imaginable and just as he was not mad when under his premiership thugs who were members of his party joined forces with the police and the army to attack peaceful demonstrators on their way to Żejtun.

KMB was then very sane — but took terribly insane, horribly deranged decisions. If we consider him insane then we would let him off: poor old idiot, thinking silly stuff. Let’s all have a good laugh about it.

We seem to forget — do we have national amnesia? — that the man was Prime Minister and in 1987, with Malta in complete chaos, nearly won the election which would have seen his party, the MLP, keep the reins of power for another god-only-knows how much.

This man had half of Malta — or just about that — not just applauding him but voting for him. The MLP — now nicely called PL — as far as I know has never told us that their former leader was mad. They have never denounced him and his acts and they have never said that all he did was the result of some silly streak in his brain.

The PL is so proud of those times of madness that they still have people from that era in the party today. Leo Brincat, now nicely dappled in shining environmentally-friendly suits, was in the party then; and so was Joe Debono Grech whose antics in parliament remind us all too tragically of those far-off horrors.

But I will not say they were all crazies, all loons. If I — or any of us — say that then I must exonerate them of all guilt, all the wrong.