The Prime Minister, who is making the most incredible fuss about the Deputy Opposition Leader’s builder’s bill (which Mario de Marco has paid) is now refusing to answer questions about who paid for his family holiday at a very expensive hotel in Dubai over Easter.

Muscat first pretended not to know that he had been challenged by the Opposition to produce the hotel bill and proof of payment, looking quizzically at the journalist who door-stepped him and asked what he planned to do about it. And then, when the Nationalist Party reissued its challenge, the Prime Minister had the Labour Party reply with a statement saying that the Opposition leader is “ridiculous”.

Exactly why did the Labour Party reply, anyway? The demand for answers about his costly Easter holiday was made to the Prime Minister and not to the Labour leader. If the Labour leader had taken that holiday, and people suspected that he had not paid for it, it would be a matter of no small concern, certainly, but nowhere near as great a concern as when the Prime Minister does so. Questions addressed to the Prime Minister in his capacity as Prime Minister should be answered by the Office of the Prime Minister, even if they come from the Nationalist Party as distinct from the party in its role of Opposition (in parliament).  That is supposed to be why the Prime Minister has a small army of communications aides, and not simply to give his old Super One cronies a grace-and-favour appointment.

It is disgraceful that when the Prime Minister is challenged to tell the truth about who paid for his family holiday and how much it cost, instead of respecting those completely legitimate questions – which are in the public interest – with a proper reply, he has the Labour Party’s communications office brush them off instead, while his own communications aides fool around on Facebook or deride ‘enemies of the state’ on their blog.

A week’s stay at the Hotel Atlantis the Palm in Dubai, for a family of four, costs many thousands of euros. Over high-demand Easter, the rates go through the roof. I am not persuaded that the Prime Minister paid for this trip himself. When he said to journalists that he pays for his own holidays, there was nothing convincing in his body language or the way he said it, but rather the opposite. He looked like a teenager coming through the door at the crack of dawn to face angry parents and heading straight for bed after saying “Of course I called you. I always do.”

The Prime Minister is not the sort to ‘waste money’ on anything and is, on the other hand, the sort who will have the Treasury pay him €7,500 a year to use his own car. That sort of man does not go on very expensive holidays unless somebody else is paying, because he sees it as money down the drain. Mrs Muscat, notoriously leading by example in liberal progressiveness, doesn’t work and prefers to be a kept woman in 2016, playing around with vague charity work like some remnant from the 1950s if not actually the Victorian age, when charity was a distraction for the redundant wives of very important and busy men. So she didn’t pay for it either.

And beyond that, neither the Prime Minister nor Mrs Muscat – especially not Mrs Muscat - strike me as the sort of people who would pick a ‘sun and swimming-pool’ holiday in Dubai rather than something immeasurably more interesting and flashy if they were going to spend the thousands anyway. The sunburn-prone, bored-everywhere Joseph Muscat, spending seven days by a large swimming-pool surrounded by crowds of sunbathers? I don’t think so. Not if he had to pay for it, anyway.

That holiday will have been something they were offered and thought they ‘majtezwel’ take, because as Mrs Muscat was once quoted as saying, by a journalist working for a British newspaper, who met her at a party: “If there are two of us, we get more treatment.” Now the big question here – the one journalists and the Opposition justifiably want answered, is who gave them the treatment in Dubai, who paid for it, and why.

There is another question – a tangential one, but no less significant. The newfound magnetic attraction these individuals seem to have developed for Dubai – John Dalli is spotted on the flight out there and back at least once a month – makes me wonder whether they have bank accounts there or elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates, perhaps Abu Dhabi. All we know is that they are on the flight to Dubai and back from Dubai. When they land, for all we know they’re heading off to another one of the Emirates.

But the bottom line remains this: the man who made so much fuss about the gift of a homemade clock to a politician who wasn’t even a cabinet minister when he received it, practically building an entire tranche of his electoral campaign on it, cannot now refuse to answer questions about who paid for his very pricey Easter holiday and why. Still less is he entitled to insult as “ridiculous” those who insist that he gives the public the answers they want.

Muscat’s refusal to be transparent about his holiday invoice can only be down to one of two reasons: he paid for it himself (and how likely is it that somebody who is notorious for being tight with money would have done this?) and is embarrassed to reveal to his supporters that he splashed out on a holiday as much as some of them earn in a year, or he has no invoice to show because somebody else picked up the tab.

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