Or so he said on a tour of the Playmobil toy factory yesterday. So that's all right then - as long as he is prepared to take the insults and criticism that come his way for failing so badly in his concrete and costed road map, then we needn't worry. Let the power station come along when it comes along, if at all, and meanwhile power tariffs will be reduced and the government will scrabble around elsewhere to make up the shortfall, again at our expense.

Somebody should take the energy minister aside and explain to him in gentle tones (he's highly strung enough as it is) that of course he is prepared to take political and press flak for whatever he does or fails to do. Otherwise he wouldn't be in politics in the first place. Maybe he just doesn't understand this because he's such a newbie, but a politician who says he's prepared to take the flak is like a journalist saying that he's prepared to spend hours sitting at a keyboard when others are off duty. It goes with the territory. If you were not prepared for it, you wouldn't be in it, so there's no need to say it because you sound fussy and ridiculous.

Mizzi told the press during his factory tour that Playmobil will be saving €900,000 a year with the planned 25% reduction in power tariffs for businesses. I'm quite sure they're relieved to hear that, but it was a little unfortunate that Konrad Mizzi became the news story for the media his office invited along - shouldn't Playmobil have done the inviting? - to cover his visit. The real story here is not Mizzi and his power tariffs, but Playmobil and its apparent troubles. This is one of Malta's largest and oldest employers, with around a thousand people on the payroll. Cheaper electricity will help, but it goes beyond that. Unfortunately, this is an Industry Minister matter, and not an Energy Minister matter, but the Industry Minister Chris Cardona, who appears to have a particular fondness for meddling in casino tenders while factories, the backbone of blue-collar employment and a big driver of export revenue, struggle along.

I don't know whether this is just my imagination, but there seems to be a complete divorce between the Industry Minister and industry. Apart from the fact that it looks like he doesn't know much about the subject and has even less interest, he has made it clear that Malta Enterprise, which is in his portfolio, is a fiefdom unto itself. Yet Malta Enterprise is responsible for factories. When he was asked, last year, for information about Sai Laing's contract and Shiv Nair's, Cardona literally brushed journalists off by saying that he knew nothing about the subject, and that he was not involved because it was between them and Malta Enterprise. And this is when he is the minister responsible for Malta Enterprise.

But then you have to ask - is any minister doing anything at all? Several of them are never in the press, so you can't gauge what they are up to. And of those who do feature regularly in the media, some of them on a near daily basis like the Police Minister, it would be best if they didn't at all, because coverage only serves to make them look more inept and conniving. The Police Minister has even managed to turn himself into a strange sort of paradox: the more press coverage he gets, the more secretive and non-transparent he looks.

Staying out of the limelight altogether doesn't work, though, as the popularity polls show. The deputy prime minister is invisible most of the time (though they wheeled him out for budget day) and yet that has not served to make him more popular. People just don't know what to think about him, and so they think nothing at all.

The reality is that this should have been Labour's Camelot - the first 20 months of power after years in the political wilderness of Opposition, lurching from chaos to misjudgement to chaos to misjudgement. These 20 months should have been marked by excitement in the air, zing, a sense of something new and thrilling, massive energy, people in high spirits, buzzing around with new projects, getting down to work...but instead what we have is massive tension and a return to the days many of us remember with a knot of anxiety from the Golden Years of Labour: waking up every day to ask ourselves, in the famous words of Dorothy Parker, "What fresh hell is this?"