After days of heavy hinting by the government on everything from the sale of Air Malta to the announcement of some major project in collaboration with those countries beyond the EU with which we are meant to be expanding our horizons, the prime minister yesterday called an urgent press conference which only served to heighten the speculation even further.

He arrived with his health and energy minister. Reporters immediately wondered whether it was the state general hospital or the gas pipeline that was now going to be subject to Chinese investment. The backdrop for the podium at which the prime minister stood was a phalanx of Maltese and EU flags. Muscat made his announcement: two cents off the price of petrol (which he had raised only a month back anyway), €1.30 off the price of a gas cylinder until the end of September (when nobody will be using them for heating), and the price of diesel to stay the same until December.

Reporters at the press conference hung about in anticipation of something more. Where was the beef? But that was it. That was the big news. No change in the price of diesel, and two cents off petrol. Oh, and that euro off a gas cylinder, but most of us aren’t likely to be buying more than two of them before December, and there’s not a lot you can do with €2.60.

But seriously – a prime minister giving a press conference about the consumer price of car-fuel and cooking-gas? Where does that happen? Thirty years ago, his predecessors used to make announcements about the prices of canned goods. Nobody, not even the most fervent Labour supporter, wants to go back to those pathetic days. We now expect our prime minister to call a press conference to announce matters of national importance or some really important news about job creation. And even there, we don’t expect the prime minister to do it himself. We expect the relevant cabinet minister to do it, or the cabinet minister’s underling. Maybe Joseph Muscat didn’t trust Konrad Mizzi to announce a two cents discount on the price of petrol without cobbling it up and exposing himself to questions about why the contract for the new power station hasn’t been signed yet though the power station itself is scheduled to be up and running in March. And many reporters tend to be obliging with Labour: they don’t butt in and ask the questions anyway. They obediently stick to the agenda and at most will ask for cookies.

Unemployment is on the rise, there are question marks all over that new power station and the reason why the contract hasn’t been signed yet, 70% of Delimara power station and 33% of Enemalta have been sold to China, chaos reigns at the state general hospital, nobody seems to know whether they are coming or going, and the government ties itself up in knots with talk about positive energy while the Labour Party paints a bus in beautiful colours and tours it round the island to persuade people to vote for Alfred Sant, Miriam Dalli, Marlene Mizzi and that man who gave up his seat in the Maltese parliament so that Joseph Muscat could become Opposition leader.

And we are supposed to rejoice about two cents off the price of petrol even if we don’t buy the stuff and have no use for it. Meanwhile, the parliamentary secretary for planning announces that one of the government’s proposals for dealing with a surfeit of dead bodies is dissolving them in chemical solution and pouring them into the sewage or using them to fertilise fields for bumper crops of vegetables. Life in Malta under Labour tends to be surreal, but this particular script has taken on shades of black comedy.