Mr Muscat, what is your favourite colour? Do you have any hobbies?

Joseph Muscat has been interviewed for the ‘Societa’ (which doesn’t quite translate as ‘Society’) pages of the Italian national newspaper La Stampa, by Alain Elkann.

It reads like a ‘what is your favourite colour and do you have any hobbies’ version of an interview with a prime minister about his country.

At one point, Muscat even has the brass neck to tell his interviewer that the Maltese were much influenced by the British and that it is from them that we got our Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play.

Incredible.

He also said to Elkann that Malta is one of the most progressive and liberal countries because it has legislation on civil unions and ‘gays’. Such a shame that Elkann, who comes from a prominent Franco-Italian Jewish family and who has made it his life’s work to write about the subject of Jewishness, did not ask Muscat how the liberal and progressive Maltese, with their Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play, consider Jews and Muslims.

We never got to find out what his hobbies are, or his favourite colour.

Alain Elkann really had to dumb things down here.