Where’s his tailor?

Is this photograph which Glenn Bedingfield keeps using supposed to make Joseph Muscat look masterful and impressive? I don’t expect Bedingfield to notice why Muscat should never be photographed full length unless he does something about his trousers, but the job of an aide to the Prime Minister is precisely that – among other things – so clearly, he isn’t doing it.

Unlike some of us lucky ones (sorry, chaps), the Prime Minister can’t actually do anything about his shape simply by losing weight, because the underlying skeleton is what it is and can’t be changed. So he has got to have his trousers tailor-made to fit rather than buying them off the peg and not even bothering to have them hemmed to the right length.

In addition, that leg-width is all wrong. Trouser-widths for men are now far, far narrower and the bagginess is therefore doubly wrong. Narrow trousers are extremely difficult to wear when a man does not have a naturally elegant figure, but with a good tailor, it can be done – and when you are the Prime Minister, you really do have to make an effort, unlike the rest of us who are not representing our country and can do what the hell we like.

You can say that with the island in corruption meltdown and everybody except Juncker talking about Malta’s shadiness rather than its sunshine, the Prime Minister’s trousers should be the last thing we are bothered about. But you would be wrong. Careless trousers on a Prime Minister just make the overall shabbiness so much worse.