The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Prime Minister’s vast team of communications aides, composed almost entirely of inept losers put straight on the public-payroll gravy-train from the Labour Party’s TV and radio stations, are slipping up badly in allowing the release of photographs like this one through their very own Department of Information.

Muscat’s trousers have always pooled around his ankles – and I really can’t understand why his clothes-fixated wife and their army of aides can’t get him to a tailor to get his hems done – but now that he has also shrunk physically, and dramatically so, the too-large, too-long trousers are actually heightening the ‘seriously ill’ look.

We last saw this scale of sudden, dramatic shrinkage in Karmenu Vella, whose suit-jackets apparently overnight began looking like car-coats. Like Muscat, Vella was always a short man, but but we’re not talking height here; we’re talking overall shrinkage.

Karmenu Vella is 25 years older than Joseph Muscat. He was in his 60s when he began to shrink, which indicates that old-age-related osteoporosis is the cause of his now-much-smaller skeleton. But at 43, Muscat’s sudden shrinking can’t have anything to do with osteoporosis. He just looks ill.