I’ll start by congratulating the young man who put together that audio clip of me and others that is going around the internet - it’s on my Facebook page if you want to grab a listen. I’ve already given him an ‘attaboy’ personally and I would like to add my thanks for his having made it ultra-clear that when I made that crack about Labour supporters’ DNA, I was making a reference to Charles Mangion and nothing more.

My inflection, clearly audible on the clip, makes obvious to anyone of the meanest intelligence, whatever their DNA, that I was quoting someone (Mangion), quite apart from the fact that when I said the heinous words, I actually said I was doing that little thing.

I’m labouring (sorry...) the point because the Premier’s little minions, right up to one of them employed by him as a person of trust, apparently to confect a blog to outplay (poor man, an impossible task, even if he were any good at it) Daphne Caruana Galizia’s excellent site, have got really, really annoyed at me and have virtually pilloried me for daring to use their own words back at them.

For the first time in a long while, an actual paper communication was sent to me bemoaning my reprehensible behaviour, though of course, there was no indication of any manner in which I could, if so moved, respond to my interlocutor. So I’ll have to use this medium and ask that next time, please use much softer paper, so I can put the epistle to an appropriate use.

To contextualise the DNA jibe that so irritated the minions, it was made in the course of a discussion on Net TV about various ramifications of the Panamagate scandal. I don’t usually use the -gate suffix, but in this instance it is excusable, because just as Watergate had done for President Nixon, Panamagate could well do for Premier Muscat.

As I write, he still hasn’t detached himself from the mess that has engulfed him and his two closest aides.

Toni Abela should have allowed wiser counsel to prevail and he should have not allowed his name to go forward

In fact, he’s been and gone and made things even worse for himself , by using the “innocent until proven guilty” get-out in respect of his chief of staff, evoking aspects of criminality (it’s a maxim used in criminal law) while all the rest of us, living out here in the normal world, know as a fact that this is hardly the point, given that it’s highly unlikely in the circumstances that anyone, not even that anonymous “international audit firm”, will find criminal-court level evidence.

That’s the whole raison d’être of Panama, BVI and such exotic places, that they allow those with nefarious intent to evade scrutiny by the boys and girls in blue, even if these latter were to get off their behinds and do something. I suppose they’re busy uncovering the Opposition leader’s petrol expenditure, it being suspiciously low when compared to that of Premier Muscat’s missus.

The DNA jibe, then, was made in respect of those who, in the face of the lies being put about by Premier Muscat’s machine, continued to believe them (the lies and the liars). In fact, I would have thought that my characterising the people who resorted to those filthy lies about Anne Fenech as liars and challenging them to sue me for calling them such, would have caused more of a stir amongst the minions, but that was ignored.

Allow me to repeat the point: anyone who seeks to draw a parallel between Fenech’s firm having, back whenever it was, given professional assistance to a client to set up a corporate structure in Panama and the mechanisms resorted to by Panama Hats Konrad Mizzi and Keith Kasco Schembri just recently is lying, there’s no two ways about it. And anyone who lies, or who uses lies to argue a point, is himself a liar, pure and simple.

Beppe Fenech Adami is now in the same sort of cross-hairs, with Premier Muscat’s willing servants spluttering about “tax audits” and “dubious decisions”, some of which were made when he wasn’t even an MP, for heaven’s sake.

The depths to which these people and their willing collaborators will descend, causing themselves to wallow even more in the very filth that they try to make us ignore, is astounding. Panama, though, was blown off the front pages, for a bit, by another ‘scandal’, Toni Abela’s failure to get the endorsement of the Budgetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament for his nomination to the European Court of Auditors.

As I write, there were rumblings that Premier Joe would be pushing ahead with the nomination, but I recall that Abela had said that he would withdraw his candidature if the Committee did not endorse him.

Anyway, that’s for him and Premier Muscat to sort out.

The ‘scandal’ that has taken over the mediasphere, at least the one dominated by the minions, is the one that attributes Abela’s failure to win the committee over to a “secret dossier” that was sent to the members, because, don’t you know, these people don’t have their own research staff with access to sophisticated means such as Google. I mean, how else would one of them have found out that Ħamrun is not, actually, a major town but a relatively small village?

If you want the real reason why Abela didn’t make it, look at the recording of his interview and read his written response to the questionnaire each nominee had to answer. These aspects of his ‘performance’ have been discussed in some detail, and except for the minions obsessed with the secret dossier, the rest of us know why he didn’t make it.

In retrospect, Abela should have allowed wiser counsel to prevail and he should have not allowed his name to go forward, because clearly, he doesn’t have the attributes needed for this type of job. He would have saved himself the embarrassment and saved us being embarrassed along with him.

That’s not to say that Abela has no attributes at all, but just not the ones needed for the post up in the general direction of which many observers saw Premier Muscat as booting him. Perhaps it is to this aspect of the whole sorry affair that Alfred Sant was referring, when he pointed out that a dirty political game had been played on Abela.

Sant also contradicted the minions, when he made it clear that PN MEPs had done their best for Abela, while there’s a story in Thursday’s Times of Malta that says that, conversely, his own party didn’t step up to the mark for him.

I wonder why…

Just briefly, because it’s time to go to work, if you want an excellent Italian meal, not at one of those places that look dodgy, go to Buon Gustaio in Paceville. It is worth the effort and then some.

At a different end of the scale, though with the same philosophy underpinning it in a sense, is the forn (don’t know the exact name) in Xagħra, opposite the Toy Museum.

And for lunch in town, in South Street, there’s the Pulled Meat Company. There are other places if the crowd is too thick, but persist, it’s worth it.