Kellyanne Conway gave us “alternate facts” to justify her boss and his slavering thirst for power. The most powerful man in the post-truth world embraces lying as the means to his ends.

Locally, Premier Muscat, even before achieving high office, was never going to let accuracy and solid factual foundation stand in the way of a ‘good’ story. The last few days have simply confirmed this. His handling of ‘Egrantgate’ is symptomatic, though it’s not only about Egrant, not by the longest of chalks.

‘Egrant’ was initially non-existent. The Panama Papers are now believed by everyone except the terminally deluded: Egrant Inc. exists. Premier Muscat’s alleged connections to it were dismissed as the occult imaginings of a rabid blogger. It morphed into a confection of the Nationalist Party, theories put paid to by the emergence of stories about a whistleblower.

With the link becoming solid in the public perception, Premier Muscat’s knee just had to jerk.

He asked a magistrate to inquire into the story and called a snap election, bringing both courts into play, the real one and that other pesky one, where public opinion is the only judge. In the first court, the wheels grind slowly (disappointingly so for Premier Muscat) while in the second one, the verdict is certainly not developing to his liking.

When all else fails, bring out the nuclear option, the American liar would say, so last Wednesday, the Russians were blamed.

His arsenal spent, Premier Muscat spiralled down into playground taunts of “chicken, you’re chicken, chicken, I say

Malta fell about laughing and Facebook was almost broken, but the real picture is not funny. We have a Prime Minister whose survival is so vital (to him) that he will clearly resort to anything.

If it suits him, and apparently it does, he will chicken out of press conferences, interviews (except with ultra ‘friendly’ interviewers) and debates. He will even go beyond the pale and seek to impose his will on the judiciary, not a new phenomenon with Labour premiers.

Friday rolled around, and with it the debate out of which he just could not get.

His two sidekicks, and he by a process of necessary association, were – yet again – engulfed in an avalanche of corrupt money-laundering activities, with documentary evidence surfacing just as the Xarabank debate started.

Premier Muscat’s response was predictable and poor. A bit like his governance of the nation.

Visibly shaken, his first shot was that he had a ‘whistleblower’ who “tells me that the story is completely incorrect”. Whistleblowers report about illegalities to the authorities and are not little waggy-tail poodles who feed their benefactors titbits in exchange for nice big contracts in Gozo, so we were less than impressed.

His next gambit was to imply that Simon Busuttil and his two deputies are also tainted. If those were his best shots, he’s in trouble: the Busuttil ‘story’ is old and plurally spherical.

Mario De Marco immediately called him a liar and Beppe Fenech Adami has been exonerated, by an inquiry appointed by the Premier himself.

His arsenal spent, Premier Muscat spiralled down into playground taunts of “chicken, you’re chicken, chicken, I say”. His stress levels were such that he forgot that it was he who had sent a minion to face the press in the most important presser of any campaign. He lost his cool and the debate.

Under Premier Muscat, however, Malta has lost more than a debate. Don’t just take it from me, ask respectable people in financial services and tourism.

The interests of his Premiership are not the nation’s, and the way affairs have been conducted under his watch make it necessary that he goes.

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