I couldn’t watch Donald Trump being sworn in, and it wasn’t because of his politics and his lousy personality (though that, too). It was seeing him juxtaposed with his wife Melania that made me switch off. It was a disgusting sight: twisted, dirty and perverse. A raddled old man with carefully set hair, a long-collapsed face, bloated body and sour face, with an aggressive personality and no charm or manners, with a beautiful woman a generation and a half his junior, taking it for granted that she is his because he has bought her – what does that say about women in 2017?

And that miserable child, completely dejected, pale, unable to smile, and no sign at all of any kind of relationship or interaction with his father. No wonder his mother has taken an executive decision to stay home with him in Manhattan while the father and husband moves into the White House. They must be so relieved to get rid of him – relieved enough to pass up the chance of living at the world’s most famous address after Buckingham Palace. When Mrs Trump decided to stay away with her son, I revised my opinion of her, for the better.

 

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The Education Minister, looking like a particularly unpleasant nun who’d lost her habit, called a press conference yesterday with his close friend the executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology. It didn’t turn out quite as planned. They were clearly thinking in terms of all the excitement they created around themselves four, five, six years ago. But now they are not fighting against the government and it must have occurred to them, as they sat down and faced those journalists, that they hadn’t worked out what tone they could use now that anger and hysterics are off the cards.

So, they were more than a little subdued, and also confused. They hadn’t planned or rehearsed what they were going to say and whether it would make any sense to journalists who had trekked all the way up to Mdina on a cold and windy day, to sit in a damp cellar-like room at a restaurant called, appropriately, Bacchus. In their situation, I would have been quite short with the two ill-mannered men on the other side of the table.

The Education Minister spoke a little about how pleased he is that the Maltese bishops have now given priests permission to give Holy Communion to divorced people. Can he be any more ridiculous? That has nothing to do with the price of eggs, but he’s obviously sticking to his mid-1970s agenda and the Marc-Bolan-era issues which preoccupy him still.

And Lara Boffa’s aging boyfriend spoke about his haunting obsession of the last decade or so – me. That’s right, he dragged busy journalists all the way there to tell them something the entire island knows: that he hasn’t moved on and that his resentment towards me boils his dreams and turns them as sour as his friend Bartolo’s facial expression.

That shambolic odd couple got coverage, all right, but it wasn’t the coverage they had hoped for. The reports were sprinkled with words like bizarre, strange and surreal, and those who wrote them made it obvious that they were perplexed at the behaviour of two men who hold high office but behave like loonies. It did, however, give us an unprecedented opportunity to examine, at close quarters, the executive chairman’s most recent experiments with Botox and facial fillers.

 

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Even though it has since been revealed that Vassallo Builders paid Marsovin €8 million for the company which owned the Qormi land that Janice Bartolo’s boyfriend has been bleating about for more than a week (and a further €700,000 to the government), Janice Bartolo’s boyfriend hasn’t stopped bleating. Does his life depend on this or something?

When Vassallo Builders acquired the land, it wasn’t even owned by the government. It was, at that point, owned by LBM Breweries Ltd and Vassallo Builders bought that company. Owen Bonnici, who for the last year has been used by the Triad as their lapdog, has tried to turn this into a suspicious deal between Jason Azzopardi and Vassallo Builders, when he knew all along that it was a suspicious deal between John Dalli and Marsovin.

Bonnici looks increasingly troubled and distracted, his eyes always fixed on some distant, invisible point, and his temperament becoming more and more irritable and arrogant by the day. I’ve just been thinking how much trouble it is to govern badly, make corrupt deals and keep track of all your sleaze. Isn’t it easier to simply govern well and sleep properly at night? But then I suppose that was never their intention and it’s too late now.