Yesterday we had two bits of Taghna Lkoll news: that a government minister’s wife really has been given a package worth €13,000 a month by her husband’s government, and that Labour Party activist Wenzu Mintoff, who for years edited the party’s official newspaper, has been made a judge despite never having practised at the bar and despite (because of?) his deeply divisive and really quite bitter attitude towards his political opponents.

The man is the opposite of impartial. No opponent of the Labour Party can be guaranteed a fair hearing before him, or feel confident of one, and the opposite holds true. How can he hear any case involving members or officials of the Labour Party and expect everyone else to have their mind at rest that the suit will proceed with fairness and impartiality? It is not only because of his intimate involvement with the Labour Party over decades, but more pertinently because of his attitude towards those who oppose, dislike or detest the political party he worked for, an attitude revealed in the way he writes about them.

No doubt, the records are now about to be Stalinised. Judge Wenzu’s bitter and nasty articles about opponents of the Labour Party will be vaporised overnight, like all those articles and recordings of Joseph Muscat telling us to vote against EU membership because it will be the death of us. I suppose I am fortunate in that I shall never have to appear before him. He has written the most horrid things about me so many times that any fair hearing would be out of the question and even if he did not decline the case himself, I would be protected against being forced into that situation, under the Constitution.  And right there you have, in synthesis, one of the reasons why people like Wenzu Mintoff should not be made judges or magistrates: because there are very, very many people whose cases they cannot hear in good conscience and under the safeguards of our Constitution.

You can, of course, see what’s coming next from the prime minister with whom we have been saddled for the foreseeable future. “The PN is in no position to speak because the PN government appointed Noel Arrigo.” So one lousy decision justifies another, then, does it? And in the track record of lousy appointments, the Labour government of 1996-1998 did a fair bit of damage to the judiciary with some pretty lousy choices. One of those choices is currently undergoing proceedings before the Commission for the Administration of Justice. Another of Labour’s choices, this time of the ‘golden years’ government of the early 1980s, is about to evade impeachment by using one delaying tactic after another until he retires in a few days. Wenzu Mintoff has in fact been appointed to replace him. Nobody can say that he has big boots to fill.

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I wrote, some days ago, that the prime minister will only release Mrs Konrad Mizzi’s contract when he wishes to be shot of her husband. And that because the inevitable ensuing flak will rebound on him – the main reason her appointment is widely viewed to be a blatant act of abusive cronyism is because she is married to a government minister.

So now I think we have to consider that possibility a little more closely, given that her contract has been shown to parliament (and the public) and the fall-out has been quite tremendous. The prime minister must have known that people would immediately bring out their calculators and work out that yes, her package really is €13,000 a month and not €3,000 as she claimed “holding back tears” with handpicked journalists on the China trip.

I don’t think it is entirely coincidental, either, that Konrad Mizzi accompanied the prime minister to China last September as a key part of the delegation, but was not included this time. Perhaps the prime minister thought it unwise to have a husband and wife combo in last week’s delegation? Who knows – we don’t even know what the wife was doing there. We were told that it’s because she speaks fluent Chinese and knows the culture, having lived there. But then so does the ambassador, Clifford Borg Marks. He has lived in China for probably longer than Mrs Mizzi ever did, and speaks the language like a native.  He probably earns as much as she does, too, even though he lives in China anyway and doesn’t need any of those relocation expenses and other perks. But then we’re just going to have to get used to the sight and sound of all these freeloaders and grabbers elbowing each other at the trough.