[Daphne – I work in the field, so I know the criteria and they’re too complicated to go into here. Basically, what you have to look at first, before you even begin assessing success or failure, is whether the consultant is fit for purpose. In this case, the answer is no, because she has no track record in public affairs, still less in political public affairs, and makes the cardinal error (in political communication) of projecting her own feelings, which are those of a marginal – though electorally crucial – social group onto the rest of the population. I imagine that Joseph Muscat, who has a long track record in political public affairs and communication, knows this – which is why I wrote earlier that the real reason he is paying her is to serve the purpose of a decoy duck. He’s floating her out on his pond to bring in the real ducks that he wants (“Look, there’s Marisa in the Labour pond. It’s safe for us to go there too”. Bang! Bang!). Yet this objective was undermined by the announcement that Mrs Micallef is being paid by the opposition to carp against the government, which undoes her credibility and undermines her arguments, making them considerably less effective than they would have been if she simply wrote a newspaper column paid for by her newspaper, describing her true feelings. I don’t think Muscat is going to be measuring Mrs Micallef’s success, because that success, in his view, has been scored already by acquiring her scalp.]

“Remember, the truth is very easy for me to remember. Spin on the other hand is not.”

Marisa, you’re spinning faster than PSR J1748-2446ad. No wonder your memory is hazy.