Mr Schembri is claiming that he is not corrupt, despite moving to set up a secret company in Panama along with favourite minister Konrad Mizzi and Mr Egrant just days after Labour won the general election in 2013, sheltering it in a top-secret trust in New Zealand, then hunting round the world for a shady bank that would take them as clients.

(In the end they solved the problem by setting up a shady bank in Malta, hiding in plain sight.)

His government salary is just peanuts to him, Mr Schembri said, because he has retained his companies and his shares and that is where he makes his money. But the way he is using his government influence to benefit his private business in Malta is entirely a separate corruption/trading in influence issue and is not an argument in his defence.

He also said that he was unable to reply to the corruption accusations in the past two years – but it hasn’t been two years – because of a “medical condition”. Would this be the medical condition that they claimed he didn’t have, when the Prime Minister’s chief of staff disappeared for months, I wondered why, found out, and then reported on it?

There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.

Because the People’s Party does not have an absolute majority of the vote, the People’s Party will have to form a coalition with one of the other two. Sebastian Kurz had fallen out with Christian Kern, leader of the Social Democrats, so his coalition will be with the far-right party, which is led by a neo-Nazi, Heinz-Christian Strache.

The difficulties of the free world continue.

Sebastian Kurz, 31, the new chancellor of Austria

I drove up to park in the old trade fair grounds and found it packed with cars when it is usually empty on a Sunday morning. There was even a big coach. So few of the people outside the party club were actually from the village. They drove in or came on the coach, to create a nice crowd for the cameras. It looks like it’s going to be a long five years of campaigning.

Meanwhile, down the road in Mosta, the Nationalist Party leader was doing his bit for the decimation of democracy, preaching in the car-park accompanied by his loyal courtiers David ‘Rank Xerox’ Agius, Kristy Debono and Hermann Schiavone, making the Nationalist Party look like a band club committee, while all others flee.

Then some people are surprised when somebody caught cheating at university level so many times goes on to take a state salary for a job he doesn’t do – a job he shouldn’t even have in the first place because he got it through political connections when the Nationalists were in government.

The Nationalist Party has spent the years since the high point of taking Malta into the European Union in 2004 weakening the links in its chain, so doggedly that you almost have to wonder whether it was deliberate.

One lies and the other cheats – what a dream team

He will compete against fellow MP Robert Arrigo for the post. Contenders for this post do not have to be members of parliament, but both of them are.

There are also just two contenders for the parallel post of deputy leader for parliamentary affairs: Edwin Vassallo and David Agius. This post by definition has to be filled by a member of parliament.

Mr Agius is the party whip.

Toni Bezzina will be competing against Robert Arrigo for the post of Nationalist Party deputy leader for party affairs.