With friends like Deborah Schembri, does Chris Cardona need enemies? On one crucial point, Cardona agrees with the critics who want him fired from the Cabinet. He has declared that frequenting a brothel is conduct unbecoming of a government minister.

Hence why he denounces Daphne Caruana Galizia’s charges that he spent three hours at a German brothel last month. He’s not saying his privacy has been invaded; he’s claiming to be a victim of character assassination.  (Disclosure: Cardona is my second cousin.)

But, in the thick of Brothelgate, Schembri chose to write an op-ed in this newspaper proposing that reportage of politicians’ sexual lives should be greatly restricted by the passing of a new law. Despite her dismissive references to “alleged sex scandals” and “mud-slinging”, the timing of her article shows little faith in Cardona’s own claim that Brothelgate is a fiction that has nothing to do with his actual private life.

Why else would a junior minister responsible for planning and bureaucratic procedure choose this moment to venture outside her area of responsibility? She suggests that frequenting a brothel may be no more than a “steamy spa experience” and that politicians have a right for their “tantric pleasure” and “private eccentric behaviour” to remain private.

Schembri wasn’t done with undermining Cardona. In her rush to trivialise sex scandals she wrote coyly about some scandals being a “blooper of Nixonian proportions”. Except that the former US President Richard Nixon isn’t known for a sex scandal. His ‘blooper’ was a crime, public lies and a massive cover-up. Only a presidential pardon kept him out of jail.

It is time to be anxious about our rights when a junior minister suggests a new law that would subvert our existing media law

Cardona, somewhat better read than Schembri, can’t have been too thrilled by the comparison to Nixon. A cover-up, lies and a false oath are also what Cardona is being accused of. And, in the 45 years since Watergate, no one has ever suggested that the US public’s reaction was disproportionate.

But perhaps the most damaging thing about the article is simply that it came from, of all people, Schembri.

So far in her political career, she’s shown very little affinity for, and understanding of, political principle. She didn’t even squawk when pushbacks were threatened in 2013. She’s pooh-poohed away the significance of a minister owning a secret company in Panama. Just days before her article appeared, she brazenly endorsed the choice of Lino Farrugia Sacco, a disgraced judge who only escaped impeachment by retiring in the nick of time, to chair the new Lands Authority.

So, Schembri’s sudden interest in the political principles governing a mature democratic society suggests she is flying a kite on behalf of her master, Joseph Muscat. For Cardona, this is another public indication that the Prime Minister is keeping a watchful distance from him.

And, for us, the wider public, Schembri’s absurd arguments take on a sinister significance.

Her argument has no legal basis. This much was shown in this newspaper on Tuesday. The University’s dean of the Faculty of Laws, Kevin Aquilina, showed how Brothelgate falls well within the media law’s definition of the public interest, while Schembri’s own casual definition of public interest falls far short of the law.

In the same issue, the editorial showed how Schembri’s proposal was flying against European human rights case law. Not least that she is suggesting that politicians take over, from the courts, the right to decide what speech is in the public interest. It is time to be anxious about our rights when a junior minister flies a political kite, presumably on behalf of the government, suggesting a new law that would subvert our existing media law as well as the human rights principles enshrined in our Constitution.

Apart from the subverted legal principles, there are also the political assumptions about the relationship of government to the public. Schembri’s proposal wouldn’t make sense without two unspoken assumptions.

First, she clearly departs from the notion that our current law is defective in the protection of privacy and the public interest. Yet it is no different from laws in the western European mainstream.

She is assuming, therefore, that there is nothing wrong in Malta passing a law, governing the media, that would deprive the country’s journalists of freedoms that other Europeans take for granted.

Second, her definition of the public interest – “the general welfare of the public, plain and simple” – is patronising. It transforms us from adults to legal minors, with politicians deciding what it is that is good for us to know.

It’s noteworthy that Schembri dismisses any public interest in sex scandals as emerging from a prurient curiosity, alienated from the issues that put “the current administration in a good light”. The only exception she allows for is sexual hypocrisy.

The patronising doesn’t end there. Schembri all but says the public doesn’t know what’s good for it. Coverage of policians’ sexual lives could lead to the loss of talent in public service.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t give examples. But there are good reasons why, in more mature democracies, coverage of politicians’ sexual lives is considered justified under wider grounds.

Yes, adequate journalistic coverage would have disqualified John F. Kennedy. But it would have documented what we now know: that he was a sexual assailant; that he used the Secret Service and White House personnel to procure prostitutes and call girls on a daily basis; that his philandering twice (at least) endangered national security.

But the governing standards of European and North American journalism would also have judged – as historians do now – that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s extra-marital affairs, and Dwight Eisenhower’s war-time affair, had no significant bearing on their respective presidency (unlike Roosevelt’s cover-up of the real state of his health).

European laws, and Anglo-American standards of journalism, are adequate for a responsible coverage of politicians’ lives in the public interest. They do not legitimise prurient snooping into politicians’ private sexual lives.

And any attempt to give Malta a patronising media law should be seen for what it is: another retrograde step reversing our society’s integration into mainstream Europe.

ranierfsadni@europe.com