“Guys, guys – we need to have a photo call showing Joseph kissing a black baby.”

You’ve got to move with the Zeitgeist, right? A couple of years ago he standing next to Manuel ‘I Love Jackboots’ Mallia and threatening vulnerable immigrants with pushbacks, separating the men from their wives and children and lining up Air Malta planes and the army to fly them back to Libya. He was stopped only when a small army of lawyers filed a judicial protest in Malta’s Courts of Justice and others got an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights.

Eighteen months ago he was telling the European Commissioner on immigration to ‘smell the coffee’ and watching in delight as his followers crowded her official Facebook page to shame themselves and Malta with suggestions that what she needed was to be raped by black penises.

Three years ago, he was arguing with the then prime minister, in parliament, against rescuing drowning immigrants because it was not Malta’s problem.

Now here he is today, kissing somebody’s black baby in a set-up photo-call, applauded by admirers as though kissing a black baby is an act of supreme courage and as though normal people in the 21st century distinguish between babies on the basis of skin colour.

And true to form, it is a studied kiss with no emotion and no engagement, practically identical to the photographs of him kissing his wife – he is looking elsewhere to see what is going on while he is supposed to concentrating on the person in his arms.