I’d like to kick off by making a small clarification: my reference last week to Toni Abela’s travails with that pesky white powder wasn’t meant to insinuate any criminal nefariousness on his part. I thought it was pretty darn obvious that it was merely a reference to the political baggage he has had to carry for having had to be the poor sod who was lumbered with the job of handling the potential political fallout. It was, as far as I remember, consistently made amply clear by the cops that he wasn’t in any way criminally involved.

As I think I’ve made clear, I find Ton’s brand of politics pretty dire but on a personal level, I couldn’t gainsay his standards of behaviour.

Having just mentioned them, can I address a small question to the cops?

When, pray tell, are you going to investigate the awesome stink of corruption that permeates the atmosphere in connection with the Gaffarena Scandal, as it has come to be known, somewhat unfairly for the Gaffarena escutcheon, as it should really be the (alleged) Muscat-Falzon-Gaffarena Scandal?

I mean, you raid the Land Department and make like the Keystone Kops all over the place, and then tell us that it’s not, actually, an investigation. Should’t you get off your behinds and do that little thing, namely investigate?

What is it with Owen Bonnici? He’s got some good stuff going on at the law courts, having continued the modernisation started by Austin Gatt, but then he goes and messes it up with his silly remarks in defence of his monumental gaffe with the nomination of those advocates to the bench.

Read my lips, young(ish) Owen: there was – and remains – no doubt in anyone’s mind that your nomination of Zammit Young was not in accordance with the Constitution that you have sworn to uphold. The Commission for the Administration of Justice’s diplomatic way of telling you this was clear enough. Perhaps you should ask your Premier Joseph to explain the British way of saying things. He has their sense of humour, or so he says.

He certainly doesn’t have an Italian one, but more on that later.

It will be no surprise, then, that... there will be no one to ask precisely how SuperKon is going to manage to fulfil his ministerial duties and his party duties

And then, just to make things infinitely worse for the hapless one left standing, Bonnici mentioned specific individuals to bolster Labour’s usual puerile argument that “the Nasty Nats did the same, so there”, thereby inviting everyone to make comparisons between the people to whom Bonnici referred, neither of whom was the Speaker’s daughter, and the individual who has to carry the stigma of the way she was nominated and the controversy it generated for the next 30-plus years.

Talk about a poison chalice – and talk about Premier Joseph’s minions not getting that when you are in a hole, you stop digging. Not that you can blame them really, their boss does exactly that, as we saw, to our cringing embarrassment when he tried to take on that Italian journalist and failed, miserably and utterly.

Just a little note on that sorry episode, directed towards all Premier Joseph’s little groupies who saw it as a horrendous attack on Malta and the Maltese: it was no such thing. It was a legitimate journalistic tactic (for all that some so-called journalists in Malta sniffily looked down their noses at it) which was turned into a way much larger story by the inept performance of our very own Premier Muscat, who started out feeling all warm and snuggly that he had an international camera pointed at him and then rapidly descended into his usual schoolyard spluttering when he realised that he had been set up.

And what price all Premier Joey’s “persons of trust” media and show-biz experts now, ay?

Not content with letting their boss flounder like a beached sea bass, they proceeded to set Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi up for the same experience without even briefing him, as evidenced by his own inept showing.

Leaving the digging of holes aside for the moment, do you think that Dr The Hon. Husband of Sai Liang Konrad Mizzi will succeed in his quest to be given even more furrows to plough? Not content with being Minister for Virtually Everything, he now wants to be deputy leader of the Labour Party, not that there’s much of a difference between country and party when these clowns are in power.

Given that what Mizzi wants, Mizzi gets, no one has dared contest him for the post, it having been made pretty darn clear by Premier Joseph that it was his fervent desire to see Mizzi fill the (gently and lovingly) kicked-upstairs Toni Abela’s size nines.

It will be no surprise, then, that when the Labour Party’s great and good are convoked to rubber stamp the whole thing, there will be no one to ask precisely how SuperKon is going to manage to fulfil his ministerial duties and his party duties.

Oh well, they’ll just have to hold him to the same standards to which his lady is held to justify her 13,000-whatever euro per month out of the public purse. She gets away with it, why shouldn’t he, is he the child of a lesser god or something?

Getting back to those holes, the prize for the current most industrious shoveler must go to that Franco Debono person. Not content with alienating himself, terminally, from about half the country, he’s now starting to do the same with the other half, by having public bitch-fights with the guy who is technically his boss. And that’s apart from swiping ineffectually at people like Judge Giovanni Bonello, whose credentials, if I had to put it kindly, eclipse Debono’s to such an extent that it’s like comparing a pocket calculator with HAL 9000.

In the world that most of us inhabit, if you don’t like what your political masters are doing, and Debono clearly doesn’t, you resign and walk away, your dignity intact. The problem for Debono and the horns of the dilemma on which he’s impaled himself, if he does this, he makes himself even more irrelevant than he should properly be considered to be.

Some media outlets, for reasons known only to themselves, still give him the time of day, as they do to that other specimen, Pullicino Orlando, presumably excusing themselves on the basis of the official sop-roles they hold.

Take that out of the equation and Debono plummets into deserved oblivion.

In the case of Pullicino Orlando, it might be a kindness to leave him alone and let him disappear into the sunset, as his interview a few days ago in Illum shows. His obsessions about, among other things, Austin Gatt (retired) and Richard Cachia Caruana (likewise) are being fuelled to what is fast becoming a dangerous level and it’s getting painful to watch.

I bring you, finally, news that cheers: the good folk at Zero Sei in Valletta have branched out into the pizza business, with a cellar establishment in South Street (also in Valletta, in case you didn’t know) just before you get to the Osborne on the left. We went there last week and came out full to bursting, as we were prevailed upon to try out substantial samples of everything.

It was right there up to Zero Sei standards, which since it carries the same name with pizzeria added on is lucky, and those are good standards. Just a small niggle, some more work on the acoustics and decor might be in order, as when it’s fully open and crowded, it’s likely to be a bit raucous.

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