The barbarians were at the gate in January 2013, Martin

Martin Scicluna, the Times of Malta columnist and former government advisor who urged us all to vote Labour and who portrayed Joseph and Michelle Muscat as the fresh new incorruptible faces of the future – he was so impressed by them it was almost funny – has written a column, published today, about the disgraceful situation with those skyscrapers.

He has called it Barbarians at the Gates. But the thing is that the barbarians were at the gate in January 2013, and Scicluna is one of those who opened it and helped them through, believing that all they would do was massacre the individuals he held in contempt and place their heads on spikes on the city walls.

All of this could easily have been foreseen – it certainly did not come out of the blue and I am astonished at how surprised he sounds. A man of his age and experience should have been a far better judge of character. The country owes him no thanks for doing his utmost, successfully, to inflict this mess on us.

If he had any sense of decency and self-respect he would now try to right that immense wrong by campaigning to get these corrupt crooks booted out before they do even more spectacular damage to everything but their secret offshore accounts and those of their bent friends.

But Scicluna is not going to be doing that any time soon, because like Astrid Vella he can’t get past his contempt for the Nationalist Party and what it represents to him in historic and contemporary terms.

Interestingly, Scicluna writes about the Gasans without mentioning them by name. Did he honestly believe that they campaigned for the Labour Party before the last general election because they believed that Muscat was incorruptible? They did so because they recognised him to be corruptible and on the make.

Scicluna is dishonest in failing to point out that the skyscraper permits were refused under the Nationalist government and that is one reason – other than the power station – why the Gasans and their even crasser fellow-travellers, the Fenechs ta’ Tumas, worked on getting Muscat into power.