It has become common for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat not to stick to what he says and take his decisions depending on the people he is dealing with.

We’ve seen it of late with the way he defended Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri in spite of the political risks he is taking because of their involvement in the Panama Papers.  Mizzi and Schembri are responsible for the greatest political crisis Muscat has had to face since stepping into Castille, and yet he is holding on to them for reasons unknown to us.

It has been written over and over again that the way he treated Mizzi and Schembri is different to the way he demanded resignations from Godfrey Farrugia, Manuel Mallia and Michael Falzon.

These double standards were once again in evidence last week, when his aide Glenn Bedingfield lashed out at a judge. Before the 2013 election, Muscat had disposed of his then deputy leader Anglu Farrugia for criticism levelled at a magistrate. Anglu Farrugia was not indispensable, and he was removed, but Bedingfield apparently is indispensable to continue dishing out venom against anyone who dares to condemn the government and Labour Party, including the media that does not lick the PM’s boots.

That Bedingfield chooses to mis-spell the Opposition Leader’s name to make it crudely sound like the translation of a Maltese word used as a vulgar insult is already reason enough for him to be dismissed. But his boss Joseph Muscat is not giving a good example in terms of standards, seeing that he himself used disparaging words in Parliament against Simon Busuttil and needed to be stopped by the Speaker.

Bedingfield holds the unenviable record of falling to new lows every day, with his latest attack on the Opposition Leader for going to Mass as a private person the perfect example of his disrespect, spite and immense stupidity.  He is fomenting hatred from the Prime Minister’s office with the blessing of the Prime Minister, and this is unacceptable. 

We do not cry foul because of what Bedingfield attempts to write; we cry foul because of what he attempts to write while holding a job at Castille paid for from taxpayers’ money. But we’ve learnt that we cannot get this into his thick head, or that of the PM, for that matter. Maybe he can get someone to translate this into Maltese, but I doubt whether he will get it anyway.

Last week will be remembered for another matter.

Again, we had seen it from Joseph Muscat in the past.

He had adamantly been against gay marriage, insisting that for him marriage is a union between a man and a woman, but changed his mind after the election. Whether he did so because he finds it easy to change his principles or else to gain political advantage is not known.

But what he said last week about Malta’s European membership is by far the Prime Minister’s mother of all u-turns.

After leading a crusade against EU membership, after telling us to tick the ‘No’ box, after working to deprive Malta of the millions of euros it has benefited from since it joined the EU, after doing his best to prevent our country from being among the decision-makers around the Brussels table, after telling Iceland to stay away from the EU – now he realises and admits that the EU is the best thing ever to have happened to Malta.

It exposes him as a politician who has no foresight. It makes him a politician with a history of wrong decisions. It describes him a politician with no principles, an opportunist always ready to sway his beliefs according to what suits him best at the time.

One Labour supporter, tongue in cheek, told me last week: “At this rate I just hope Joseph Muscat does not wake up one day and tell us he has got it all wrong, and that he is a Nationalist.”