Have you noticed how Muscat hasn’t said, “Of course I would never do something like that, because it’s wrong”?

The way that the prime minister is defending himself should tell you enough: “I deny that I own the company and that my wife owns the company (company with no name), and if documents are published they are forged and I will want them authenticated.”

I’m going to put things into perspective here. If somebody accuses me of having a top-secret company in Panama and a bank account at Pilatus Bank into which I receive millions from corrupt PEPs in Azerbaijan (and this even though I am not a politician or a prime minister), my response will not be “They are lying and the documents are bound to be fake.”

It would be: Of course I don’t XYZ. And then I would explain why, starting from the fact that it goes against my principles to set up a secret company in Panama and then take millions from corrupt people in Azerbaijan.

I would explain that I simply wouldn’t be able to do something like that from a moral perspective, besides thinking it absurdly dangerous, that money isn’t important to me, let alone the kind of crazed hunger to store up money that leads to choices like those. And that I don’t understand the people who do those things, or what drives their choices, but that they would never be my choices.

Did you hear Joseph Muscat say anything like that? Did you hear the Prime Minister say that of course he would never do something like that because it is wrong?

He doesn’t think it’s wrong, and he also has the parallel choices of his two henchmen to contend with. He’s been defending those choices in public since March last year.

One of my problems with these cases, and reporting on them, is coming to terms with the fact that people can be so very bad, so rotten to the core, so amoral and sociopathic, as to carve out a careful plan of how to trick and persuade people into voting them into power, so that they can then execute their primary plan of how to run the country as a (corrupt) personal business, with whole structures and networks laid out and carefully organised up ahead, including the setting up of a filthy private bank licensed by Joe Bannister’s outfit in collusion with Keith Schembri, to enable their dirty money to be laundered at home.

That people could actually devote so much time and careful planning to sheer and utter badness leaves me floundering in incredulity – not because I can’t believe that such people exist (I’m 52 and not stupid, so of course I do), but because I genuinely think “What the hell is the point?” Their choices and behaviour are so pointless that I am aghast.

Malta seems to me most times to be full of little beetles scuttling about collecting dung, admiring the shinier beetles and talking about who has the most dung and who works for the lousiest beetles for a great deal of dung because they’ve got to eat.

All these beetles beetling about, and some of them are really bad beetles and others are just plain irritating. None of them have any imagination and all of them are really poorly educated and have a limited vocabulary and are unable to speak in whole sentences.

And the beetles that run the country are just plain awful and scary.