If there is one thing I love it must be flippancy. The act of defusing tough times with a silly retort, a laugh at your lowest point, the need to forget that sometimes life is one bitter, rough cookie, is an art worthy of any master.

So hurrah to anyone who can manage it.

However, there are times when even the most idiotic realise that flippancy will seem horribly hollow.

There was a time when I truly believed—even if I criticised him harshly—that Joseph Muscat was a man with some vision, a man who would be different from previous Labour leaders.

Today even his Teflon element—that unbelievable attribute where nothing bad, no grist, sticks to him—is wearing thin.

His smile—Cheshire-like and nearly-cherubic in his political infancy—has now gone from smug to fake to utter anger pasted over clenched teeth.

But Joseph Muscat’s prime defect at the moment is that he has become terribly rude.

Nothing anyone does or says is wrong—as long as it suits his agenda and especially if it involves land development.

Muscat’s silly answer, when asked what land the farmers to be dislodged from the Żonqor Point area are going to be given, was shameful. Give them St Luke’s, the Prime Minister retorted through clenched teeth.

The same Prime Minister then asks what all the fuss about the cruise-liner terminal in Gozo is. This is a man who claimed his mission was to clean up Malta’s act politically. Now he is feeling the heat. But beating his fists and stamping his feet will hardly change the fact that he seems to be on a drunken rampage to turn Malta and Gozo into a bigger concrete block of horrors.

Telling me and all us dullards that the PN did the same before him hardly makes it more palatable. On the contrary, it is even more damning on Joseph Muscat, his ministers, the vast majority of his MPs and all his followers.

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