Minister, the Honourable, Dr Emanuel Mallia (you have to give him his full range of honourifics; it would be bordering on lèse-majesté not to) seems to take up more space than is decent. Lest anyone starts howling about pots calling kettles charcoal grey or such, let me emphasise that it is column inches, rather than waistline ones, to which I refer.

Only last Wednesday, this august newspaper carried no less than five references to the learned gent that – thanks to the wonders of iPad – caused me to circle them with gusto.

In the first of them, starting from the top left of the page, there was the happy news that Mallia hadn’t breached his colleague’s parliamentary privileges when he gave Jason Azzopardi a number of answers to PQs (not to be confused with IQs) that the interlocutor had thought were misleading. It is a grave offence against the integrity of the House for any such answers to be given, it need hardly be said, and the Speaker delivered a weighty, and 45-minute long, ruling that Mallia hadn’t committed it.

It might be useful for Emanuel Mallia to take on board once and for all that the days of iure imperii are long gone

The offence, as in the criminal sphere, with which the minister is very familiar, rests in the misdirection being intentional and, from what I could make out, the Speaker didn’t find any intention on the part of Mallia to mislead. Consequently, it is irrelevant whether the answer was misleading, as long as the minister didn’t intend to mislead when making it.

So that’s fine then.

Working one’s way down the page, we come across another item of outstanding news value: apparently, there is no Cabinet influence on PBS listings. In fact, we are told that Mallia “ridiculed a suggestion made by Francis Zammit Dimech (PN) that the Cabinet had in way discussed or got involved in the present schedule of Public Broadcasting Services”.

I, for one, am prepared to put my hand on my heart and state that, yes, I believe the minister that nowhere in the minutes kept by our own Sir Humphrey will there be even the slightest reference to the programmes that are to be, have been or ever will be selected for broadcast on the State-owned and publicly-funded (that is by you and me) station.

Perish the thought: does anyone really think the Cabinet of ministers, worthies to a man and woman, would waste their precious time discussing the minutiae of whose programme is to appear on which channel and at what time?

These things are not decided at Cabinet level, surely! I mean, there are matters of greater pith and moment to be discussed there, such as the price of a supermarket shopping spree as defined by Minister, the Honourable, Dr Konrad Mizzi (€25, if you must know).

The problem with Mallia’s ridiculing of Zammit Dimech (apart from the act of ridiculing a colleague in itself, which is offensive but unsurprising), however, lies in the tail of the piece, wherein it was reported that, apparently with a straight face, he (Mallia) actually said that “the national broadcaster now had an impartial schedule that did not insult people’s intelligence”.

I am so glad that I got to know, by dint of Mallia’s pontification on the point, that the national station is not insulting my intelligence: I was surfing around waiting to watch a footy match on Saturday and came upon one such component of a schedule that does not insult people’s intelligence, a programme called Sibtek.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, horrendous, although, small mercies, it was not partial, except in the sense of being only partially worth watching, in that you watch it hoping it would come to an end. Luckily, the game started and I could abandon TVM to its fate.

So, that’s three out of the five circles made on page whatever it was.

It might be useful for Emanuel Mallia to take on board once and for all that the days of iure imperii are long gone/quote]

Circle number four concerned Mallia’s brazen threat that he would take disciplinary action against coppers (and presumably any other minion falling under his purview) if any of them dared to reveal information that he or she knew by reason of office.

Obviously, I would be among the first to agitate for the hanging, drawing and quartering of any public officer who broke confidentiality in respect of any information about John Citizen Esq. that came into the officer’s possession by reason of his or her holding public office. The thing is, I suspect that the minister, bless his little cotton socks, didn’t actually mean that, because you don’t actually need to remind people that they have a duty of professional secrecy.

My moral conviction is that Mallia was having a whine and rattling his sabre in the context of the information being passed to his nemeses in the House, politically-sensitive information that is not, for all that the minister would dearly love it to be, covered by the duty of confidentiality.

It might be useful for Mallia to take on board once and for all that the days of iure imperii are long gone: the State is no longer all powerful and all vanquishing and its ministers, even such mighty ones as our hero are nothing more than its, and consequently our, servants.

And so to the fifth rough circle, the one that touched on a remark made by the minister in the House about how, horror of horrors, during the inauguration of a cop-in-a-box contraption, a Times of Malta journalist had had the temerity not to be impressed with the technological and logistical wonders that Mallia was exposing before the massed ranks of the Fourth Estate but had “asked about other matters”.

Again, Dr Mallia, would it be too much to ask you to remember that we pay your salary in order for you to administer the country on our behalf and if one of our (other) representatives wants to ask you about the price of fish while you are cutting a pretty ribbon on a container, then it’s your duty to reply, civilly and without making childish remarks about where the journalist worked before or whatever?

I know you come from an environment where an impertinent witness, of the type who answers a question with a question, is told in no uncertain terms that “here, I ask the questions and you answer them” and this is as it should be, in court.

The thing is, minister, that now it is you, and your colleagues, who are standing in the witness box, there to give us answers and provide us with evidence of the effectiveness, probity and all-round appropriateness of the way you’re using our hard-earned cash to run the country on our behalf.

On a lighter, and much pleasanter, note, on Thursday (that’s the one before the day before yesterday) we went to Nabucco in Gozo, at the Aurora Theatre. It was probably the best of the Gozitan operas I’ve attended over the years and I’ve been to a few. I’m no expert but even my untrained ears and eyes can see quality when it is so abundant.

While on the subject of Gozo, could someone in the know please let us know how much the Brangelina movie being shot there has left in that fair isle, in euros? I ask because both the Prime Minister and former parliamentary secretary Franco Mercieca have shot their mouths off about “millions” and for the life of me I can’t see how this would be the case, given that this is actually quite a small production.

Would that it were so, of course, but I have this aversion to being fed tripe, with or without onions.

imbocca@gmail.com

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