Muscat has completely lost control of the agenda

For the second time in his political life – the first was when he fought tooth and nail to persuade us to vote against membership of the European Union, a painfully embarrassing fact which many people choose to overlook – Joseph Muscat has completely lost control of the political agenda.

And this time, it is much worse because he is the Prime Minister and not the Opposition leader’s bag-carrier.

From his first day as Opposition leader, Muscat had an easy ride. He even had an easy ride becoming Opposition leader, because the Labour Party invariably chooses rubbish for its leadership posts, and it’s so easy to get to the top in a party that’s full of corrupt and inept trash.

He was up against nothing much other than a dying government and political party that had been in power with just a single 22-month interruption since 1987. People were primed to hate the Nationalists and direct their support at him, so it didn’t take much other than the sort of amoral cunning that allowed him to approach individual people and groups and promise them what he could not, licitly, give.

Muscat became accustomed to the ease of putting messages out there and seeing them lapped up by the primed and waiting media, many of whose individual journalists had been courted and flattered, or brought on board in other ways.

But now all that is gone, and a bewildered, panicked and very angry Muscat finds himself chased by media stories about the secret offshore operations of his chief of staff, his financial advisor and his special minister, which they thought could never be discovered, which were discovered by a total fluke, and which have thrown them completely off track.

Not even all the public money he threw at ‘Team Ira’ along with his personal communications consultant Leslie Skipper made a difference. (Doing a great job, there, Skipper, I must say – though I’ll admit it’s difficult to help your boss talk his way out of a corruption crisis that would have seen immediate resignations in your own country.) This morning Muscat hoped to wake up to euphoria about “Ira” and all talk about corruption and offshore buried for good.

Instead he woke up to Eurovision disaster and big front page stories in The Malta Independent and The Sunday Times detailing, with documents, how Keith Schembri secretly funnelled three quarters of a million euros to the British Virgin Islands in 2014 alone, and how both he and Konrad Mizzi bent over backwards to hide their activities from the Maltese banks. And then the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists tweeted those stories, plus The Malta Independent’s leading article calling for the immediate resignation of his chief of staff, to its 91,000 followers all over the world, who began retweeting them.

God only knows how they plan to get out of this one. It’s going to be like Nixon and Watergate: two years of hell.