What is truth? asked pitiful Pilate. It was staring him in the face but he re-fused to see it. At least he did not stoop to abusing taxpayers’ money to try to ram down people’s throats his version of it.

That is what the government is doing in the case of the power station extension contract and how a mysterious official change in the goalposts enabled BWSC to win it with prototype technology that runs counter to the administration’s own declared aims on reducing emissions.

One is talking of the government here, not of the Nationalist Party. The party has its own money, collected from various sources including handsome donations at this time of year when Oliver Twist is made to look positively over-fed compared with the political parties’ hungry demand for more and more cash.

Had the Nationalist Party undertaken an advertising campaign to try to buy back public opinion which has turned dramatically against the government’s handling of the extension contract, it would have been understandable.

The Nationalists have lost acres of political ground. Suffice to say that all the local newspapers bar those published by the PN are critical of the whole affair.

Gonzipn is entitled to use all the financial means at its disposal to try to turn that around, even if it is by mounting the mother of spin campaigns. The government is another thing.

Whichever party mans it, in a true democracy the government is by all the people, for all the people. It is financed not by contributions from a partisan segment of the population, but with revenue collected in taxes imposed on all the people, not just the Nationalist half-less-something of them.

Notwithstanding such basic truths, the government is using the people’s taxes for blanket advertising intended to convince the people that the Auditor General found nothing wrong with the way the power station extension contract was handled. In that regard, the Prime Minister and his merry band are using the people’s money to tell anything but the truth.

As it did with Pontius Pilate, the Delimara truth stares everybody in the face.

It is that the government had committed itself to cleaner energy producing technology.

It is that the government inexplicably changed that decision to allow further dirty technology to be installed by BWSC.

It is that the Auditor General said in his studied report and reiterated to the Public Accounts Committee that, the government having done that, it should have issued a fresh call for tender. So did the European Commission.

The truth is that the Auditor General could not uncover the whole truth because key witnesses stonewalled with silence or amnesia to his pertinent questions to them in the name of the truth.

It is that the government did not want to allow the PAC to question these witnesses. It is that late in the day, facing wholesale hostile public opinion, the Prime Minister has relented, but intends to ridicule the PAC by calling a host of witnesses to dilute whatever it might have to ask the amnesiac witnesses.

The truth is that the government has ignored the fact that the Auditor General was troubled by a series of coincidences in the BWSC affair, and that he did find smoke, but could not locate the fire which generated it.

He did not find conclusive evidence of corruption, but he is much less than happy with the way things were done. Austin Gatt’s persistent interrogation did not make him budge.

None of that is told in the partisan full-page adverts paid with taxpayers’ money. That simple fact is exposing the government, betraying the fact that it is using public funds to create a smokescreen.

Ironically, the Prime Minister and Gatt are hoist with their own petard. Not only are they manifestly misusing public money to buy advertising space for partisan purposes – they are protesting too much.

Far too much. They are making it obvious that they know they are politically damaged by the BWSC saga.

A further irony is that Lawrence Gonzi and Gatt clearly feel they have not reached their end with the publicly funded adverts. They have also come out with a mother of spins, a monster red herring, comparing the cost of the BWSC offer with that of Bateman.

At a political level, the Gonzi-Gatt tandem are free to attack the Labour Party as much as they want. The truth is that, from the standpoint of taxpayers and their money, of society as a whole, Bateman do not come into it.

The issue is the way BWSC reached their goal after years of leaving no political stone unturned, and moreover doing so with a technology which the government had insisted it was determined to phase out.

Regarding the latter point the government pleads that Malta does not have the infrastructure to accommodate cleaner gas-fired technology.

Again, it is hoist by its own petard. For the truth is that it was the government itself, with the same party in office from 1998, even ignoring 1987-96, that should have ensured it installed the necessary technology, if for nothing else, then for people’s health.

Cost would have been high – but then, the Malta Sicilian pipeline is not cheap, either.

These are self-evident truths. The government is trying to hide them with political adverts, massive spin, smokescreens and red herrings.

The truth is that it is not succeeding. It is sinking more into a mire of its own making.