Until very recently, the Prime Minister enjoyed a reputation as an astute man who would likely be running around with the cockroaches in the aftermath of a nuclear war. To say that recent events have dented that reputation is to make a big understatement.

Partly his mishandling of the situation is down to lack of communication. One of the qualities of statesmanship is the ability to connect with the public broadly-defined, at the right moment. There is none of this in the Prime Minister at this particular time. His lines of communication are profoundly partisan.

His defence of his reputation and office is being delivered to two audiences, separately. The first is his own party. A few days ago he told the annual general meeting that he had nothing to be afraid of, and that current events were simply a thorny prelude to a rose that would bloom and make the party stronger. Not surprisingly, all ovation was strictly of the standing kind.

The second audience Muscat has in mind is Nationalists. They are, of course, liars led by a lie-mongerer of the first order. Theirs is an unscrupulous attempt to undermine the good work done by government and to destabilise the country.

Now one might argue that these two audiences make up the bulk of the population, and that the Prime Minister is therefore a statesman by the sum of the parts. Except there is no such thing. Partisan missives are a different species and cannot add up to statesmanly communication with the public.

I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who were neither the type to swoon at an annual general meeting, nor particularly interested in sabotaging the economy. Some were Labour voters and others Nationalist, but no matter – all said they were upset and confused by what was happening. They also felt the Prime Minister was incommunicado.

These people are the closest it gets to a public broadly-defined. All they got was stunted and terse statements that sometimes tended on the snide, and vacant comments about ‘serenity’. The Prime Minister has reverted to Super One party hack form.

The Prime Minister has no right to call an election to save his own skin

He doesn’t seem to realise that many of us have no wish to see him or his government sabotaged. On the contrary, it is precisely because we respect his office and wish it well that we think the present situa­tion is untenable. To the general public, the sight of a Prime Minister dodging journalists and speaking Labour-ese as he sinks under a mass of corruption charges is neither pretty nor pleasant.

Perhaps, however, it was predictable. Take the so-called Individual Investor Programme (IIP). Because I do not take my passport very seriously, I never felt particularly offended at the sale of Maltese citizenship. I saw it as a spot of forgivable wheeling and dealing that would give a few more people access to the EU and leave the Maltese exchequer richer.

I now realise it is not wise of a government to involve itself with the kind of people who are likely to spend millions on passports. The IIP, we were told, was about “attracting to Malta’s shores applicants who can share their talent, expertise and business connections”. Except the programme appears to have attracted certain other things to Malta’s shores.

Equally enriching to Malta’s shores is the ongoing love affair with Azerbaijan. In 2016, that country performed dismally on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The people running the show in Azerbaijan appear to have got on rather well with the Maltese triad. The point is that this was a recipe for disaster. In the parlance of devils and spoons, no implement is long enough to sup with the likes of the Alijevs.

These associations lend weight to the slew of corruption charges. Some may be provable, others less so, but all are eminently be­lievable. They also happen to be actually be­lieved by a very large number of people. Trust ratings or no ratings, it is a fact that the Prime Minister’s credibility is in tatters – especially with that segment of the population he so loves to court with serenades of a moviment.

It is obscene to dismiss people as the gullible victims of the Bidnija Bogan or whatever Glenn Bedingfield calls Daphne Caruana Galizia. One would have to be exceptionally short-sighted not to see the obvious, not least since there is so much of it.

For example, why does the Prime Minister persist in defending Keith Schembri? Let’s assume, just for the sake of sport, that the Panama Papers were a laugh. There is now a serious allegation about Schembri. Last Thursday the Opposition leader presented the evidence in court. Even if the evidence eventually turns out to be rubbish, the least the Prime Minister could do is ask Schembri to step aside until his name is cleared.

What we get instead is a dogged defence, and three possibilities. The first is that the Prime Minister is loyal to his friends at the expense of public office, the second that he is foolish, the third that Schembri has him by the short and curlies. The second we can discount outright. The first and third make Joseph Muscat unfit for purpose.

Five years ago I wrote two or three pieces that argued that Lawrence Gonzi was doing the wrong thing stretching it out, and that the parliamentary crisis called for an election. This time, the opposite is the case.

There is no parliamentary crisis. The matter at hand is not one that can be resolved by means of an election, simply because corruption charges cannot be written off by simple majority decision. A Labour win – which is presumably what Muscat has in mind – would leave us with carcades in Baku and Panama City, and much the same problems as we have now in Malta.

The Prime Minister has no right to call an election to save his own skin. It would be unfair to the many Labour members of government who do not have connections in Panama or Azebaijan. Above all, it would be a slap in the face of all of us who recognise this government as our own, whether or not we voted for it.

When the fish rots, one cut will do to save the rest of it.

mafalzon@hotmail.com