Can’t afford to have press photographs of protesting artists, can we now?

That would put a rocket under the myth that this government is a Friend to Artists and that the prime minister himself is ever so fascinated by art.

Do you remember that coldly calculating campaign video in which he was interviewed in his car, about his childhood dreams?

He wanted to be a vet (the animal lovers vote) because his grandfather’s dog was his best friend (ah, that would be why he’s so awkward around dogs, then).

But he also wanted to be a ‘pittur’ (going for the artistic vote here) but sadly couldn’t – not because he has no aptitude or talent, which is the reason most of us would sensibly give, but because he is colour blind. As though being colour blind has ever prevented the creative from creating, or the gifted from painting.

In any case, faced with the shocked artists plans to demonstrate in Valletta on Saturday, the Listening Government have very hurriedly leaked the information – where else if not through its loyal camp follower Malta Today – that they’ve changed their minds again.

Il-Guy will be winkled out of his tourism ministry building on Merchant Street to make way for the fine arts museum and will be packed off to – well, they don’t quite know yet, but they’re thinking perhaps he can slip inside the South Street building which currently houses the museum, and which Malta Today insists on calling Admiralty House in the hope that its brain-dead readers don’t grasp the fact that what they’re talking about here is a straight switch.

By that time, of course, Il-Guy will be well on the way to senility and they won’t need to put him anywhere. I hate to sound rude (but it’s Il-Guy, so who gives a damn anyway) but anyone who hears him muttering on radio will have noticed that he’s halfway there already and God alone knows how decisions are being taken in that building.

When they finally persuade him out and pack up the office for the Big Move, some charitable person might consider accidentally on purpose packing him up into one those crates and losing him over the side of a bastion to ensure that he will not come back as a cabinet minister in 2023. Forty years of him in politics is way more than enough already.