The beam in Muscat's eye

Here’s Muscat, in a piece dashed off before he slipped away to Tripoli.

Monday, 6th October 2008, The Times
Hackers and loaves
Joseph Muscat

The government announced its proposals for the new utility bills. The Finance Minister said that “the government was aware of the effect this would have on families and was carrying out a socio-economic impact assessment on the proposed tariffs” (October 2). Pretty interesting methodology. First you make proposals and then you carry out an analysis of the repercussions!

This from the man who needed five years of hindsight to discover that partnership didn’t win the referendum – and who still thinks that partnership was an option, but hey, membership won so let’s go with it, brother. What a prat.

Then there was this:

Some friends told me they would bet their bottom dollar that the government will be ready to settle for slightly lower price hikes than the ones proposed. It would then start telling us that its social conscience drove it to make such a decision. Old habits are hard to die.

He needed some friends to tell him this (as opposed to a little birdie, I imagine) because even though he’s going to be running the country in five years’ time, he couldn’t work it out for himself. And old habits are hard to die, eh…..read my lips, Muscat: OLD HABITS DIE HARD but BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO. I’m always astonished to find that you can work your way through a doctoral thesis and still get such elementary things wrong. Maybe they made allowances for him as coming from a developing, non-English-speaking country.