The Minister of Transport, Joe Mizzi, is one of those men of slight build who are a giant of comedy in their own mind. In Parliament, the other day, he decided to go one better than his colleagues in answering one of my parliamentary questions.
I had decided to put to the test Labour's claim to be 'the most feminist government in history'. I asked each member of the cabinet how many women have been appointed by this Government to decision-making positions.
Mizzi rose in the House. He leered and asked: What exactly did I mean by 'positions'? Nudge, nudge. Ho-ho.
I'll leave it up to readers to decide if the wit displayed surpasses the humour that Mizzi once flashed in promising to resign if we did not discover oil under his watch. Or if the joke he played on me is better than the one he's played on all of us with public transport.
I will just say that it was the men of the Opposition - and not those of the most feminist government in history - who didn't think it was funny at all. It took Mario De Marco and Chris Said to admonish the feminist Minister for managing to both sound like a complete idiot and for speaking with such innuendos about women in general.
Mizzi wasn't much worse than the rest of his cabinet colleagues, however. All of them, except two (Anton Refalo and Edward Zammit Lewis), answered my question with their own question: What exactly did I mean by 'decision-making positions'?
Presumably they couldn't be sure whether I meant positions where women have to decide how warm to serve the feminist Minister's tea or which letter to type first.
You and I might immediately know what 'decision-making' refers to. But the most feminist government in history is so broad-minded as to think that perhaps I might also have been referring to the decisions that need to be taken by cleaning ladies, secretaries, clerks and mid-ranking officials. Heavens, I might even have meant the career-decisions that bimbos have to take.
Make no mistake. They all answered my question with the same question because that was Castille's decision. This was inadvertently revealed by Edward Zammit Lewis. He initially tabled a full comprehensive answer to my question. Someone must have chewed his head off because a few days later - having already showed that he understood perfectly well what I meant by 'decision-making positions' - he replaced his first answer with another. Yes, you guessed it. His new answer was: What did I mean by 'decision-making positions'?
Why, you might well wonder, would Castille take this line on a question that, after all, invited it to boast about one of its key 'progressive' pledges?
One reason is that it is, for all its boasts, out of touch with women's issues. The claim to be 'feminist' is one clue. Life and women have moved on since 'feminism' was a powerful meaningful slogan. Nowadays, the issues are framed as having to do with 'gender justice'. Women's issues are men's as well. Injustice with women, the suppression of their true potential, helps breed immature unstable men. Injustice with women robs men of the experience of having true partners.
Let me put it this way: To boast about being 'the most feminist government' is like putting on a Che Guevara T-shirt at a protest rally in 2014. It's the nerd trying to seem radical. It's the man, brought up to see women fundamentally as bimbos, who thinks it's revolutionary to make a few concessions to women, instead of seeing their empowerment as the flip side of his own personal development.
And the actual results show. Not just in the men's ministries, either. Did I tell you how many women Minister Helena Dalli has appointed to chair the 20 boards that fall under her ministry? Five (and she chairs a sixth herself). Yes, five: a mere 25 per cent.
That's no irony and no blip. You may remember that, last year, it emerged that the then new Labour government had appointed fewer women to boards than the Gonzi government had. This year, the international figures continue to bear that out.
We now have the Global Gender Gap Report for 2014. Read this slowly: under the most feminist government in history, Malta has dropped 15 places (yes, fifteen) down the rankings - to 99th out of 142 places. (Last year six fewer countries were included in the rankings but the drop from 84th place isn't explained away by this alone.) Labour: Is there no promise they're not prepared to break?