In what I suspect is something of a departure from his normal style (I don’t actually remember him ever filing a libel suit, though, of course, I might be wrong) Joseph Muscat, leader of the republic’s loyal Opposition, has said that he will be taking out proceedings against the Nationalist Party about that billboard showing him freezing the minimum wage.

He seems to have said that he will be suing anyone who has anything to do with it, for that matter, in which case, matey, you’d better sue me and the myriad others who have put his smirking face onto their Facebook page.

Come on, then, put your money where your smiling mouth is and take us all to court where you can continue to prove that your cage has been rattled and well and truly, too.

If you really go through with your little adventure in the law, your reaction to being poked with what seems to have been a particularly pointy stick, let me give you a trailer of what our defence will be.

I’m sure your various legal beagles know this.

You see, my dear fellow, you started out by talking about substituting the minimum wage by a living wage. Then you backtracked on that to mumble something relatively incoherent about the minimum wage not being up for monkeying around with.

Then, just to demonstrate that your advisers haven’t managed to get you past that insatiable desire you seem to have to have everyone love you all the time, you backtracked on that too and started scrambling around squaring the circle and banging round pegs into square holes, to the extent that the General Workers’ Union, of all things, found themselves having to try to agree with you on the minimum wage.

So, frankly, any interpretation of your position is fair game for the rather neat defence of “fair comment”, especially since, don’t you know, you shot your mouth off in public each and every time, rendering you, in a democracy open to the concept, alien as it may be to your predecessors (and quite a few of your contemporaries, oldies that they are), freedom of speech and expression.

Put differently, given that you seem to be unable to make up your mind about which policy you’re going to espouse at any given moment, you can’t blame people for making it up for you and for wondering whether your every utterance is conditioned by who it might have been you were having a drink and chinwag with in those cozy-up to the middle class sessions you’ve been having.

What, precisely, does Muscat expect, since he hasn’t made any so-called policy any clearer than mud? Don’t give me that guff about roadmaps and congressional votes, those were platitudes heaped upon platitudes heaped upon even more platitudes. When you don’t make it clear what you intend to do, such as whether you’re making eyes at the hunters or getting all pally with the contractors, you can’t blame every Tom, Dick, Harry, Sophie or Emma for doing the pretty obvious math.

But who cares about such things as the minimum wage or the safety of the birds and the environment when there are such matters of earth-shattering importance as the privatisation of car parks to get all exercised about?

Watch Muscat and his little acolytes leap manfully onto the bandwagon, as one of the stalwarts, Owen Bonnici, had already done by the time I started writing this on Wednesday.

I’m mortally offended, by the way, at Labour for leaving me out of their billboard about Lawrence Gonzi’s friends.

I am proud to call all the people in the picture my friends, of a greater or lesser degree of closeness, and it would have been an honour to be associated with them in what Muscat’s PR gurus clearly think is a sublime piece of thinly disguised intimidation.

Getting back to the sayings of the clan Muscat, but not Joseph this time, but Josie, who I believe is not actually related, I had formed the notion, back when he (Josie Muscat) was militating within the ranks of the marginally racist but certainly hard right Alleanza Nazzjonali, that his ideas were on the more unconventional side of things.

His latest public noise, about how domestic violence is very often triggered by the female side of the equation having provoked the male beyond endurance, is proof positive that, not to put too fine a point on it, he should shut up and be done with it.

By his own logic, Muscat is agreeing with the murderous thugs who killed the American Ambassador to Libya in defence of Islam, scandalous though writing such a thing about one of the great religions of the world may be. Josie Muscat Applauds Fundamentalism, there’s a headline you never thought you’d see.

Allow me to end this week by extending an ‘attaboy’ in the general direction of Simon Busuttil for his, now recognised, work on diabetes among the spires of Brussels and the mandarins who inhabit them.

And while on the subject of ‘attaboys’, off goes another one to Joseph Calleja, Gramophone mag Artist of the Year.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20