Mario Farrugia Borg, a convert to Islam who will bore the pants off anyone who will listen, has been given a job in the Office of the Prime Minister, as the PM’s interlocutor with the Muslim community.

Effectively, what the prime minister has told us here is that Muslims will only speak to you if you are a Muslim, so he felt the need to employ the services of Farrugia Borg because nobody in his office, himself included, will be able to communicate with Muslims otherwise. This is patently untrue, and undermines his own supposed lesson in liberalism and equality of treatment because it makes Muslims out to be a whole different category of strange and unusual creatures who speak only a language called Islam.

Those Muslims who are not quite au fait with democracy are not upset or offended because they do not feel patronised, which they should do. And so they were right there, beaming at the press conference yesterday with the prime minister, who had no qualms about telling us that Farrugia Borg was appointed “because he delivers, but he also happens to be a Muslim”.

Oh right, he delivers - but what, exactly? Not pizza, that’s for sure. And if this appointment is based purely on the ability to deliver, then surely there are several individuals, all of them trusted by Labour, who could have been considered and interviewed for the post.

The prime minister did not say what Farrugia Borg delivers, but that didn’t matter because the Imam at the Corradino mosque, who was present for the press conference, told us himself. Mario Farrugia Borg was instrumental in convincing Maltese Muslims to vote Labour in this last general election, the imam said. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do so, but he made Farrugia Borg sound like a man selling shares in a Ponzi scheme in return for a large cheque which he picked up yesterday.

The imam, Mohammed El Said, made a point of thanking the prime minister for employing “for the first time” a Muslim “representative” in his private secretariat. Again, he unwittingly spoke the real truth by making him sound like the Muslim ambassador to the Court of Joseph Muscat, rather than just another employee in the private secretariat.

Many Maltese Muslims actually grew up elsewhere, in a highly undemocratic environment, and so do not understand democracy, still less liberal democracy, though everybody clearly understands the power of the vote as influence. What anybody else might consider an insult – parading a member of a minority group like Pocahontas in 18th-century London – has been interpreted as honour and acknowledgement. Imagine a situation where the prime minister had appointed a woman and described her as his “interlocutor with women” or a gay man as his “interlocutor with homosexuals” or even a woman in a wheelchair as his “interlocutor with disabled people”. That wouldn’t go down too well, would it?

If the prime minister were truly liberal, the gender, sexual inclinations or religion of the members of his secretariat would not be an issue or even of interest. The fact that he actually is making an issue of it, to the point of calling a press conference with the mosque’s imam to announce this appointment, means clearly that this is the central issue to him. He has not acquired a reliable adviser who delivers. He has acquired a Muslim scalp to affix to his bedpost. For the relatively inexpensive cost of that Muslim scalp’s salary over five years, he will acquire hundreds of votes from people who are not too embarrassed to own up to the fact that they are so very easily impressed, that their vote is so simply bought, and that they form their decision to vote on such spurious grounds (like so many other Maltese).

In any case, I find it hard to believe that it was Mario Farrugia Borg who convinced Maltese Muslims to vote Labour. The community we are talking about here is very specific and certainly does not include all Muslims in Malta, or even all Maltese Muslims. It is largely a working-class community centred on the Corradino mosque and the annexed Muslim school that was funded until two years ago by Muammar Gaddafi. Maltese Muslims and Muslims in Malta who come from a non-Gaddafi-linked background and who are not working-class send their children to fee-paying independent or even Catholic schools, where they follow the regular syllabus.

The point I make here is that the Maltese Muslim community centred on the Corradino mosque and its adjacent formerly-Gaddafi-funded school were Labour to start with. This is by dint of their socio-familial connections and their own links with the regime of the murdered despot of Libya. The school has been run by the same woman since it was set up in the 1970s, and she is definitely not a Muslim. She is a Labour politician called Maria Camilleri, who was very close to Labour Prime Minister Dom Mintoff when the money and the order to build the mosque and school came in from Muammar Gaddafi.

We are speaking here of working-class women who were born Maltese and raised as Catholics, who converted to Islam upon marrying working-class men born and raised as Muslims in (mainly) Libya, who have become naturalised Maltese citizens through their marriage and residence in Malta.

Not content with Farrugia Borg’s appointment to the prime minister’s secretariat, the imam called in his pound of flesh by asking the prime minister to waive the €400,000 loan that the Corradino school received two years ago when it ran into financial difficulties after the Libyan despot who funded it was overthrown. The loan was approved by Lawrenzi Gonzi’s government and Gonzi himself promised to waive it as a sign of goodwill. Now Muscat has done the same, but the problem here is that his Education Minister has just told the press that money for state schools is in short supply so the school-building programme will have to be brought to a halt.

Waiving the loan “should not be a problem”, the prime minister told the imam. But finding the equivalent amount to refurbish a state school apparently is.

If the prime minister wishes to help the Muslim school financially because the Maltese state helps Catholic schools financially on the basis that they do not charge fees, then that is right and proper. There should be no special treatment for the schools run by one religion over the schools run by another religion. But that means that the Muslim school will then have to be subject to the same rules, syllabus and scrutiny as Malta’s Catholic schools. And that is going to be next to impossible.