Joseph Muscat in 2008 and 2013: “I don’t agree with gay marriage. It is not natural. Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

And quite frankly, these are two of the very rare times when you can tell that he is speaking his true feelings about something, rather than cynically saying what he thinks people want to hear, which he is how he suddenly became the champion of gay men (but not gay women) overnight.

This is probably the real reason his government enacted a civil unions law for same-sex couples, which is completely identical to the Marriage Act in every respect, but refused to call it marriage and is still dragging its feet four years later about whether to call it by its real name.

But they are so ridiculously transparent in this, aren’t they? Last year, in the thick of the Panama crisis, they trotted out a promise for ‘gay marriage’, trying to distract people from talking about Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s nefarious and illicit activities involving Mossack Fonseca. And it backfired bigtime, with gay rights activists calling on the government to stop using its cause for its own foul ends.

And now, undeterred by last year’s bad reaction, they have done it again. Once more in a storm of scandal – which has gone international – about its attempts at repressing the media and journalists who expose things the government would rather be kept hidden, the government has wheeled out the promise of ‘gay marriage’ to distract us.

Perhaps the government believes it can negate all harsh international criticism of its attempts at silencing its critics by saying:

“You know, we’re actually really quite progressive and liberal. Why, look, we might even call the civil unions law by its proper name – gay marriage! So why are you criticising us? Surely people would be quite content to have their freedom of expression curtailed and critical journalists systematically targeted, if two men can marry each other. Two women? Well, we don’t really bother about those in the southern Mediterranean, unless it’s for sex and cooking, and when they get in the way we call them witches.”