When it’s Ricky who loves you

Many of us already knew it, but the evidence heard in the trial confirmed it, in spades. Labour’s ability to turn whatever it touches into something that needs investigating, explaining, revising or disinfecting is spectacular.

King Midas turned things into gold. The one they still call Il-Kink refined a rather different speciality. We pay the bill, they and their good buddies get the lucre, and often a photograph.

Consider this silly episode: David Walliams, a smirking comic who actually boasted, in jest, about sleeping with Johann Grech to get a gig in Malta, actually turns out to be something of an alleged sexual incontinent.

How reassuring for an administration whose understanding of cultural achievement seems to require somebody recognisable standing beside somebody ministerial.

As I said, a silly episode compared to the horrific filth we’ve been hearing about, but symptomatic nonetheless.  It raises the usual questions: who is spending our money, and what is he getting out of it, compared with what the country should be getting.

Pretty standard questions, but under Labour, asking them somehow becomes an act of national sabotage. You ask, you protest, you speak out, and revolting little creatures like Neville Gafá and Ricky Caruana will dedicate spluttering diatribes, replete with actual swearing and vulgar misogyny, to you.

Keeping to the inconsequential, but still expensive, messes this bunch of incompetents keep making, consider this.  The minister (ir)responsible has just announced, in the wake of a drunken orgy of violence and looting that accompanied a recent music (sort of music, anyway) fest, that the subsidy whereby private entrepreneurs are given public money to facilitate their making even more money is to be revised.

Not removed, mind you, revised. We still, Lord luv’us, need to subsidise ways of attracting even more tourists to this overcrowded, creaking at the seams, country.

Does anyone think these things through?  Don’t bother answering.

Tourism operators are questioning whether another of Labour’s great achievements, its cannabis legalisation, should be reversed, arguing that the sector is absorbing the consequences of government policy and inadequate control of visitor behaviour. They also raised concerns about cheap alcohol (as opposed to what they sell, I suppose) and the pursuit of visitor numbers at the expense of quality: the people whose business depends on selling Malta are asking what, exactly, we are selling.

These are all trivialities, in the greater scheme of things, but they show where we’re at.

In the same edition of the papers (remember paper?) we read about Alex Agius Saliba, Labour’s deputy leader and MEP, being questioned in an investigation into alleged procurement irregularities involving his office. He denies wrongdoing, of course, and raises the ante by calling it a frame-up (the same sort of argument Yorgen Fenech put up, coincidentally).

An investigation establishes no guilt, obviously. Equally obviously, being a Labour deputy leader does not entitle you to have scrutiny classified as persecution.

Inviting the public, directly or through faithful spewers of filth like the ones I mentioned further up, to get angry with the PN is not on, convenient as it may be to have an opposition to blame.

You’ll have noticed that I haven’t written about the fallout from the Fenech acquittal.

It is troubling enough as it stands, without my adding anything to the story at this stage. After years of waiting for the trial concerning the assassination of a journalist, the country is now trying to understand questions about the conduct of people entrusted with investigating it and the ones entrusted with deciding it.

Labour has governed this country for 13 years, and its demand that we admire the health of our institutions is becoming grotesque.

The common thread is the degradation of accountability: public expenditure whose benefits need explaining, policies whose consequences need repairing, allegations answered with partisan counterattack, and a justice system struggling to command confidence.

Prime Minister Robert Abela, looking increasingly worried, keeps whistling in the dark and telling us how well everything is going.  Sadly for him, but more for us, the cohort that agrees with him is shrinking rapidly.  When Ricky loves you, you must start wondering whether it isn’t time to leave the stage, sooner rather than later.