In one of the more inane comments to this blog (or it could've been my "Beck" column) a citizen asked me how I would like it if my emails were published by the Labour Party. This was in the context of my daring to fail to toe the party (Labour Party, that is) line about email hacking or theft or leaking or whatever and its horridness in a democratic society.

You know the sort of thing I mean, the democratic society that is being eroded and rendered terminally ill by the various attacks on it from all over. Precisely what it is the people who have come over all precious about democracy, rendering themselves apoplectic on the Brother Grim(a) show, find so worrying is not entirely clear, but there you have it, democracy is being made deficient and we shall soon be tyrant-ridden.

In answer to the inane question, I wouldn't like Labour publishing my emails and probably the people with whom I am in correspondence wouldn't either, since it is generally their business with which I am dealing, but I don't recall anything, offhand, of which I would be ashamed if the jolly old Labour Party were to publish them.

Whether or not Joseph Muscat has anything to be ashamed of up in the virtual world, on the other hand, is up to him to know and assess whether it is of relevance to the political world he inhabits. He appeared to be moderately apprehensive, when talking about the subject on the telly recently, that there are more of his emails floating around, but that's a debate he can have with someone else.

He should, however, get his act straight when it comes to characterising the means by which emails of the citizenry are treated. He implied, and consequently justified, during the same conversation, that the emails that had been published at the height (or depths) of the divorce campaign had been leaked by one or the other of their recipients, which elicited a strong and unequivocal denial from each and every one of them. No-one leaked the emails, which means that someone nicked them.

Which rather leaves the Leader of the Opposition up the Khyber without a paddle, since his strident, almost foot-stamping, condemnation of the publication of his emails rested on the fact that he was asserting that they were "stolen".

Now that the same treatment seems to have been meted out to people on the other side of the fence (as he looks at it, anyway) without any strident condemnation at the time, what price the shock-horror at Muscat's emails seeing the light of day now, huh?

Or is the democratic deficit suddenly in credit or something?