Joseph Stalin is alive and kicking in the Malta Labour Party

Look at this. Instead of issuing a medical statement, as an eye surgeon, about the state of play with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff – as the public and the press would expect anywhere in the civilised world outside this benighted, backwoods island – Franco Mercieca retweets Keith Schembri’s beyond ridiculous ‘Gandhi’ tweet of a few days ago.

That is the standard of behaviour of those who run the country now, who are supposed to be leaders of men. Franco Mercieca is the man who has spent the last few months telling those with whom he wants to build underhand bridges that Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi are corrupt, that it is obvious what they were planning to use the Panama companies for, and that the Prime Minister is in on it too. Now, he’s defending Schembri in public and colluding in the plot to conceal his serious illness.

They’re closing ranks. The crooks are driving their blacked-out-window town-cars to a deserted warehouse in New Jersey for their emergency Mafia convention.

Their determination not to say anything about Schembri’s illness and absence from work, even now that it has been revealed and the time for a clear statement is obvious, even when confronted by a journalist outside a publicity event where Schembri should have been prominently present, tells me one thing: that it’s not the public from whom they want to conceal Schembri’s debilitation, but somebody their in-house mafia has been dealing with beyond these shores.