The media has been engulfed by the multi-faceted Engerer affair this week and we are about to deviate from the general tone that others have taken so far on a state of affairs, which would be better termed as farcical were the currents underlying the debacle not so serious.

First off, the now infamous phone call made by the Head of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Edgar Galea Curmi, to Police Commissioner John Rizzo, about an alleged political motivation behind an arrest, was certainly no case of interference in the work of the Police Corps. Nor was it, as so many have called it this week, a case that calls for a resignation.

It was, in fact, undoubtedly the right phone call to have been made.

Those who are crying foul, or who have been duped into believing that a phone call from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff to the police commissioner about alleged political influence in a police investigation verges on the criminal, should think again.

Take a step back from all that you have read this week about the sordid affair, and reflect for a moment on the political fallout and the far greater gravity of a hypothetical situation in which Mr Galea Curmi had not made that phone call.

Here is how that would have panned out: Cyrus Engerer goes to Edgar Galea Curmi to express concern that his father’s arrest was politically motivated by his own defection from the Nationalist Party to the Labour Party. Mr Galea Curmi does not make that phone call and some way down the road, when the allegation of political influence comes out in court, as well as the fact that Mr Galea Curmi had been made aware of it and had not acted on the information… the rest is self-evident.

In a way, really and truly, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t make that call, at least in the public eye – which is maybe exactly how some would have wanted it. But had he not made that call that day, he would have been well and truly damned.

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff had a situation, and he acted – almost perfectly correctly. We say ‘almost’ because we feel that although Mr Galea Curmi’s phone call to the police commissioner was not only correct but also indeed necessary, those concerns should have been expressed in a face-to-face meeting, in private – and not in front of the person relaying the accusations.

Then again there are different styles of handling situations and this fact does not detract from the central argument – that he was absolutely compelled to make that phone call, whether that person was his godson, a brother or a complete stranger bringing a serious allegation to his attention.

And that is why the Prime Minister was absolutely correct in his statement carried on today’s front page, in which he says he would have fired his chief of staff had he not made that call. Mr Galea Curmi was absolutely duty-bound to follow up an allegation of political motivation behind a police investigation, anything short of that would have been an abdication of his responsibility as the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

Now for a touch of the farcical in this ugly affair. The first bit of farce is that of the Labour Party being supposedly appalled by the fact that a person in Mr Galea Curmi’s position has the sheer gall and arrogance to personally call the police commissioner about an allegation of political motivation behind an investigation.

For the record, it is not untoward in the slightest for a person in that position to call the police commissioner about such an allegation, or about other issues for that matter. It would actually be greater concern if no one were authorised to do so. This is a party that aspires to be in government; it should know better.

The second is the dichotomy of the government being hauled over hot coals for first supposedly sabotaging Cyrus Engerer with these coordinated attacks, and then be accused of interfering in a police investigation to his benefit. Something clearly does not add up.

The third − now that Labour seems to have taken a step back from Cyrus Engerer after the unseemly charges filed against him earlier this week − is that the one person benefiting from all this, in a way, is Cyrus himself, who has had the moral gravity of the misdeeds he is accused of being lost in a sea of confusion, accusations and counter accusations. It should be noted that if those charges had stood on their own without the benefit of the current controversy, they would have looked a whole lot uglier indeed.

There are, however, still too many question marks for all the facets of this affair to be put down to pure coincidence. It is hoped that the inquiry, which, we hasten to add, is independent, will successfully establish if and who spurred the crackdown on the Engerers at this particular point in time and if the police had been coerced, in any way, into action.