A week is a long time in politics, Harold Wilson is supposed to have said (but nobody knows for sure). And it’s been a while now since we last saw the truth of that – until this past week. It was the week when everything changed, when there was a definite shift, when the growing anger against the government, which had until then lacked any sort of focus, suddenly coalesced on the Minister for the Economy, Christian Cardona, who prefers to be known as Chris for reasons that will be obvious.

Now the anger that simmered beneath has been blown to the surface, and all it took was the shoddy advice of a lawyer, Pawlu Lia, who repeatedly forgets that when you work for politicians there are other factors you need to take into consideration when you advise your clients – like how the consequences of their actions in the courtroom are going to play out in the court of public opinion, which is by far the more important court for politicians, really the only one that counts. Thinking only of how they could get back at me, take revenge, shut me up, deny me access to money (had I no family I would have been left with just the cash in my purse for the foreseeable future), they succumbed to the standard tunnel-vision of those who are not particularly bright, and forgot to ask themselves: “But what will it look like to people out there?”

Well, we all know the answer to that now, particularly Cardona, who has been burned badly. He should have known what to expect. His lawyer Pawlu Lia made a similar mess when he demanded that the court rule I am not a journalist, so as to strip me of the right to protect my sources. Had he laid aside his personal animosity towards me – and the level of that animosity is something that you have to see to believe – he would have known that the court could do no such thing, and that his attempt alone would be a public relations mess for his client, Konrad Mizzi. And so it happened.

The outrage appears so far to have stopped Lia and Cardona in their tracks. I say “so far” because with people like that you never know what’s coming next. Up to last weekend, both of them were boasting that they planned to file several more cases against me this week, each one accompanied by a precautionary warrant for €11,850. Up to 10 more cases were mentioned at one point. I fully expected them to file them, because they seem to have embarked on a suicide mission, and they intended to do so, because they spoke about it up to Monday. But at some point, somebody must have held them at metaphorical gunpoint and pointed out that they’re doing far more damage to the government than they are doing to me.

At this point, I think it is quite clear that they have declared war. We have reached the farcically dangerous situation in which key members of a government are obsessively focussed on a single journalist whose silence and compliance they were unable to buy at the outset, and who they have been unable to harass into submission since. And there has been a great deal of harassment, including matters which I have not yet discussed in public but will do so when the time comes.

Given that matters have deteriorated so badly, there is another remark of Harold Wilson’s that seems appropriate here: Get your tanks off my lawn. I don’t actually have a lawn, but you get the picture. If you don’t shift those tanks, you run the risk of my coming at you with a hand-grenade.