I'm not much of a fan of the ratings agencies, given their abysmal failure to notice that trading in sub-prime mortgages was a recipe for financial wrack and ruin (or did I mean rack, mangling the language can be catching?) so my remarks should be taken in that context.

On the other hand, our beloved politicians just love the agencies, especially when they say negative things, on the Labour side of the spectrum, or when they are nice to us, on the Government side. When you are in opposition, you can safely ignore the nice things, because no-one seems to try to keep you in line, though when in Government, it sometimes gets a bit difficult to balance your feelings towards the agencies, because you want to use the nice bits and explain the bad ones.

This funniest thing, recently, was watching Labour come over all sanctimonious (a mien they are very prone to adopt) when Standard & Poor's were not particularly complimentary about Enemalta, neglecting, on the part of Labour, to tell us that the reason for S&P's downgrade was the fact that Enemalta's tariffs were too low in the circumstances.

So there you have it: Labour have promised to lower tariffs, though they are not telling us how (VAT-hike, anyone?) and at one and the same time they are having paroxysms of glee because S&P have lowered Enemalta's rating for not having tariffs that are high enough.

How do Labour balance their public postures, when they contradict them in virtually the same breath? Well, they don't, they just chuck the sound-bite into the ether and let it have its effect, in the same way, on a micro-scale that they continue to attack the Mayor of St Paul's Bay on a conflict of interest issue that has no basis in truth, either on the conflict side or on the way the Mayor behaved.

And then they whine because we don't give them the deep respect they just know they deserve.