It being April 1, we had the obligatory spoof stories on the portals today.  I only looked at the English language versions, this being an Anglo-Saxon sort of humour, which is probably why Premier Muscat runs the country as if every day was All Fools' Day, I suppose.

The other bunch ran a story about how Autobuses de Leon have been give the boot and Arriva were to do a come-back, so horrendous has been the service under Minister Joe Mizzi's watch. From the comments below, it seems that they had run the same sort of story last year, but I couldn't swear to that.

Be that as it may be, there's enough in the story to remind us that, yes, Mizzi, the one not currently invisible and who does not intend any longer to populate Panama with his New Zealand assets (or was that the other way round) is presiding over a public transport system that remains pretty dire.

The other portal in English ran a story about how the day the lease ran out is no longer to celebrated as a National Holiday because Premier Joe's business friendly government had accepted a proposal by the employer organisations to remove a few holidays in a drive to create productivity.  Yes, well, I've no idea how many believed that, though I suspect that quite a few die-hards might have.

This portal's was the best one, though. 

Times of Malta ran a story about how Sai, wife of PanamaKon, Mizzi Lang (as in lang gone?) recipient of nigh-on half a million of our euro, not counting her perks, had actually done some work and that new initiatives were to be released into the public domain soon. 

Given that to date, all we've seen, three years down the line, are an office opened here that is empty most of the time (which is still better than her efforts at the other end, where no office seems to be used) and some form of agreement that will install a Chinese Big Brother here, the joke is, you have to admit, pretty delicious.

This country is spiralling down, and no mistake about it

The biggest joke, or it would be a joke if it weren't so tragic, was a couple of days ago, though.

The Prime Minister's wife, a woman with no official standing or function and less, it is now evident, grasp of how to go about things, called a press conference to deal with the report - by Times of Malta - that prisoners who had done work for a mate of hers had not been paid for it.  Ms Muscat's Marigold Foundation (a whole April Fool's joke to itself, but one that can be told another day) was involved, so our very own Evita thought she should put the media straight.

The obvious line of reasoning available to her, that is to say a dignified statement that she would be looking into the matter and ensuring that everyone was treated in accordance with their dues, quite clearly was not acceptable to her.  "No, no, no, I am the Spouse of the Prime Minister," you can imagine her saying to herself, "what I say is important and how I say it is how I decide to say it, so there".

So instead of dignity and poise, we were treated to the spectacle of an over-made up, down to her hennaed ring-laden fingers, angry woman hectoring the press and acting like a hysterical headmistress who thinks she can treat everyone as if they were recalcitrant five-year olds who are scared of her.

Her body-language, her vocabulary and her general demeanor placed her firmly into the cross-hairs and when she got the treatment for which she was quite obviously asking, there was nothing for it but for Labour's rapidly degenerating trolls to try to rise spluttering to her defence, utterly ineffectually, it need hardly be said.

This country is spiralling down, and no mistake about it.