"Meanwhile Opposition leader Joseph Muscat, when speaking in Gudja this evening condemned Ms Caruana Galizia's comments on Dr Debono's mother and said the prime minister should act to stop such attacks."

If you have even an inkling of how democracies work, the quote above, taken from one of the various reports about that Debono person's whines, should bring a chill to your soul.

Not because it is a microcosmic example of the way Labour generally, and Joseph Muscat in particular, will leap onto any passing bandwagon in the hope of gaining some fleeting political advantage, however craven it makes them look.

Not because it gives encouragement to the sad little people who have taken comment to new lows of late, who seem incapable of writing anything that passes even slightly for intelligent interjection, preferring crude insult and barely comprehensible spluttering.

But because it betrays, brings into stark relief, if you will, the blithe assumption fostered by the so-called Left in this country, to be fair on a par with their fellow travellers in other, equally enlightened parts of the world, that political office gives you the power to dictate to free citizens what they can or can't say, do or write.

Sorry, Muscat, neither you, nor the Prime Minister, the holder of the office to which you are so, so desperate to be elected, nor anyone else will dictate to me what I will write and what opinion I will hold and publish of you, of Franco Debono or anyone else. If I transgress the law, then the law will punish me, but until that point and - just in case you can't grasp it - that will only be after I write what I want to write, no-one is going to stick his nose in and stop me.

Do you get it?

Let me spell it out: in this "legal dictatorship" or whatever it is your swooning fan Marlene Mizzi called it, we have this rather quaint concept called freedom. I am free to have an opinion and to express it and you are free to seek redress if you think I've trampled on your rights by so doing. Because your party works like that, you are also free to exert as much moral pressure on me as you think you can, though don't be too disappointed when it doesn't work.

What you can't do is try to stop me before the fact, though this simple concept appears to be anathema to people like you and your like.

So, Muscat, and anyone else who is listening, any attempt to muzzle one of us is, by necessary implication, an attempt to muzzle all of us and that is the road to dictatorship, a destination away from which we have travelled some distance since dumping Mintoff onto the scrapheap of our political history, perhaps to the chagrin of some but to the relief of many.