The government of the day has been a trailblazer when it comes to civil rights, homosexual and otherwise, and this newspaper has applauded every great stride taken over the last 14 months, but Friday’s performance by the Prime Minister was so misplaced that it beggars belief. 

A good politician, a statesman, should know full well when to come out with guns blazing and when to simply keep quiet. But Dr Muscat, instead of choosing the road of prudence – and decency for that matter – chose to attempt to create a Labour hero out of his former MEP candidate Cyrus Engerer, instead of simply accepting his resignation when it was apparently offered and zipping it.

In anointing Engerer as a Labour ‘Soldier of Steel’ as he did on Friday, he chose the worst course of action possible. Not only did he, in one fell swoop, cast the courts’ actions into question by referring to ‘coincidences’ in the timing of the verdict, but he also effectively condoned Engerer’s quite despicable and amoral behaviour.

Yes, as human beings we are all prone to mistakes and when one makes a mistake one apologises. And while Engerer has offered an apology of sorts, he is more interested in blaming the Opposition for supposedly persecuting him – infantile behaviour at best and downright dastardly and remorseless at worst.

In a nutshell, Engerer was found guilty of distributing pornography because there is no law, yet, on cyber harassment to have charged him with. If there had been, certainly sending X-rated photographs of a former partner to that partner’s employer and colleagues, in an act of pure and unadulterated revenge, would be a textbook case for cyber harassment.

But the Prime Minister appears to have overlooked this heinous act for the sake of political mileage. 

And while Dr Muscat would not be drawn into commenting on the appeal court’s verdict against Engerer this week, he instead alluded to “too many coincidences” in the case. But in so doing Dr Muscat has stirred a hornets’ nest and has indirectly accused the judiciary of bias. Strangely, when his former deputy leader and now Speaker of the House of Representatives Anglu Farrugia had also, but in perhaps more exact words, made similar accusations, he was summarily ‘fired’. Comparisons are indeed odious but there is little about this case that is not odious.

As for Engerer’s statement that he has been persecuted, one must point out that the appeal against the original court’s verdict that had found him innocent had been filed under the current administration and not the last. Is he accusing his own justice minister of some kind of incompetence or dereliction of duty?

Yesterday, the Labour Party attempted to hit back at the Opposition, which has demanded that Engerer be removed from his government capacity in the wake of the verdict. The party turned around and raised the issue of Opposition MP Claudio Grech having been found guilty of forging an ID card when he was a teenager. This is completely misleading on so many levels. How can one possibly compare this misdeed with that of Engerer? There is really no comparison in the moral laws that were violated in the two cases.

To effectively condone Engerer’s misconduct – after the cases of the Maltese selfies and several other incidents of cyber harassment and bullying – the Prime Minister has sent out the wrong message altogether.

This is not a question of being liberal, it is actually a case if bigotry. Would matters have been different if, for example, the partner who jilted Engerer and who fell victim to his malevolent mischief had been a female?

We would rather not go into the gory details of what transpired and the actions that led to the court case – these are after all private matters – and we wouldn’t have even ventured into that territory if the Prime Minister had not acted as erroneously and as publically as he did in what was a well-orchestrated event on Friday.

It is the Prime Minister’s responsibility to set the country’s moral compass, but with his antics on the Engerer case, he has done anything but. It is, in turn, our responsibility to point out when that compass needs better calibration, and this is certainly one of those cases.