Whatever gloss or spin the government may attempt to apply to this week’s so-called Cabinet reshuffle, it was anything but a reshuffle as far as what was very clearly required of the Prime Minister is concerned. It was more of a card trick that has failed miserably in the public eye.

There may have been some changes on the peripherals but when it comes to the core issue of the crisis the government is in, the situation remains exactly the same: Konrad Mizzi remains in place and has even arguably been granted more power than he had before, and Keith Schembri remains unscathed in the slightest.

The people’s voice has not been heard, and their calls for action have been nothing but mocked. If there is one thing that the population at large dislikes, the one thing it cannot stomach, that it is being taken for a fool by the powers-that-be. And that is exactly what the Prime Minister did this week.

In making his Cabinet reshuffle announcement on Thursday, the Prime Minister said that he has carefully considered public sentiment. Perhaps he did consider public sentiment, but if he did he quickly dismissed it from his equation. This is strange behaviour from a government that puts so much stock in public sentiment.

After all, his non-reshuffle when it comes to the main culprits accountable for the astonishing fever pitch of today’s anti-government sentiment has undoubtedly invoked the wrath, not only of those whose votes he knew would be write-offs at election time, but also of many of his core supporters who were waiting for him to take the right decision, to do what they knew he had to do. 

The Prime Minister has incurred the wrath of even those who were waiting patiently to see what his well-measured reaction to the Panama Papers would be.

And now that he has not done what so many believed to have been inevitable, those people are undoubtedly disillusioned and embittered, and many of them will carry those sentiments all the way to the next general election polling booths.

Transgressions like this will not be easily forgotten, nor will the bitter taste in their mouths be assuaged by any amount of sugar dished out by the government between now and then.

The feeling is that the Prime Minister has gone one step too far precisely by not taking the steps that he had to take.

What is worse still is the fact that the country’s new Minister Without Portfolio Within the Office of the Prime Minister Konrad Mizzi now appears to hold a carte blanche to delve into any area of government that the Prime Minister sees fit, being no longer ring-fenced by those pesky and pigeonholing definitions of ‘energy’ and ‘health’.

It was observed this week that the more things change the more they remain the same. This newspaper cannot but fully endorse that sentiment.

The Prime Minister has assumed responsibility for the energy sector for which, after all, he was always ultimately responsible in his capacity as Prime Minister. Konrad Mizzi has become the Prime Minister’s hired gun and he will be assigned special projects and areas at the Prime Minister’s discretion. The Prime Minister also specified that Dr Mizzi will retain leadership of the power station project, where his involvement has raised multiple concerns, even concerns related directly to the Panama Papers revelations that have plagued the government, as identified by this newspaper on several occasions. Dr Mizzi has remained installed as the de facto energy minister in all but name. Meanwhile, Mr Schembri, who along with Dr Mizzi has been named in a most shameful way given his position alongside Dr Mizzi in the Panama Papers, also stays firmly in place.

The public’s resounding calls for the heads of Dr Mizzi and Mr Schembri have gone unheeded. What we have, in effect, is the same three-headed hydra with a lair at Castille. And it appears that the Prime Minister’s thinking is that if one or two of those heads were to roll, it would make for a pretty sorry creature indeed.

This distinct lack of real action by the Prime Minister shows there is a reason why the Prime Minister cannot afford to lose either of these two men. What that reason is, exactly, is best known to him.

Instead, and after weeks upon weeks of anticipated concrete action by the Prime Minister, the end result was nothing but a half-baked solution aimed at appeasing the public, but one which has failed miserably to have any feel-good effect on anyone out there except for those so entrenched in the government or party that their personal moral compasses have gone haywire.

In an interview appearing in tomorrow’s edition of our sister daily newspaper, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti says that if a member of his Cabinet had been mentioned in the Panama Leaks scandal, it would have been the minister himself who would have been asked to leave government. Short of that, he says he would have been very harsh with the politician involved in the Panama scandal.

This is exactly what is expected of any self-respecting politician or leader of government, but that is exactly what has failed to happen in Malta, where we seem to have different standards of accountability and good governance from the rest of the Western world.

And in the meantime, the public does not even get an apology or any kind of expression of regret from Dr Mizzi, although this newsroom asked him point blank on Friday whether he was sorry for his actions and their effect on the country’s and the government’s reputation. 

Sorry, it seems, is not only the hardest word… it is not even in this government’s vocabulary.