Joseph Muscat, current Prime Minister, seems to labour under the impression that he can say anything and he will be believed, something on the lines of an ex cathedra pronouncement from Rome in the Middle Ages.

He has the sheer gall, for instance, to let it be known on telly that he considers Labour to be the underdog in the upcoming MEP elections. This is the man, please note, who has just well and truly creamed the PN in the General Elections, with the equivalent of a landslide in local terms.

And he says, without a touch of irony (for irony, you need a sense of humour, so it's a pretty sure bet he wasn't being ironic) that his party is the underdog.

This necessarily means that either he knows something we don't (that his switcher-supporters are deserting him in droves, for instance?) or that he has such a high-handed disregard for verbal exactitude that he just doesn't give a toss what he says.

I must tend towards the latter thesis, sadly, because on Monday, after he had been ripped into and - figuratively speaking - torn to shreds by Simon Busuttil, Muscat had the effrontery to say that Busuttil was out of his depth and confused. It is a measure of the man (and I don't mean this in a complimentary sense) that Muscat had to grab wildly at schoolyard-level arguments of abysmal puerility.

But then, he had spent the duration of Busuttil's demolition of his budget giggling and smirking, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

This failure to use words with any sort of respect for their meaning spilled over into Tuesday.

On being faced with a demonstration against the pimping of our nationality, a demonstration kindly allowed to take place by the heroes of the Catering Corps, Muscat told them that his Government wanted to give citizenship to more people. He was not referring to refugees, of course, but to people with a few thousand euro to play with, to whom a passport would be sold, in the same manner as you are sold a can of beans or tuna.

I refuse to believe that a man with a Ph. D. does not know the difference between the concept of giving and the concept of selling, though I am less reluctant, on the evidence, to believe that an economist of Muscat's genre is quite willing to adopt materialistic standards in the face of arguments that citizenship should not be sold.

Reprising his gross failure to show an understanding of basic theories, Muscat asked whether such arguments meant that foreigners who married Maltese spouses should not be given citizenship. Again, Muscat demonstrates that he sees no difference between entering into a serious and commitment-defined undertaking resulting in citizenship and scribbling a cheque to buy a passport.