Last time, they photoshopped him in. This time, they didn’t bother.

Once more, Joseph Muscat did not turn up in time for the group photograph when the Party of European Socialists (heads of government) met yesterday.

Last time – when the PES met in Madrid – we found out through a big article in the Spanish press, which led with the joke that everyone had forgotten about the Maltese prime minister, so when he turned up (late), there was nobody there to greet him.

This time, we can make that deduction from the fact that he’s not in the group picture.

Look – he’s not in one of those group shots. But he was definitely at the meeting, as you can see from these lovely pictures which I found among those which the PES uploaded to Flickr.

Have you ever seen him look at a woman like that? I haven’t. The rare pictures which show him talking to a woman show him frozen and indifferent, with the facial expression of an ironing-board. Unless the woman is Angel Merkel, in which case she counts as a man.

I’ve long said that this is one of the secrets of Muscat’s success with men – gay or straight, he flirts with them. The gay ones then count him as one of them, and the straight ones don’t realise he’s flirting with them because he’s not a woman and they don’t think he’s a gay man because he’s married with children, so their defences don’t go up but at the same time they process the signals positively at a subliminal level.