There are a great many ways in which practically every function of state has been all but captured by the government of the day.  It happens in plain view and it happens surreptitiously, away from the eyes of most members of the public.

This, of course, is only possible by putting the right people in the right places.

And the perfect spot the Prime Minister found for his former deputy party leader Anglu Farrugia was in Parliament, where he appears to be earning his keep in fine fashion as the government’s gatekeeper.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives has a crucial role to play. He can allow debates to take place, or he can also rule them out.  He can let parliamentary questions be asked, or he can deny them.  And there is no doubt that the current Speaker has now leveraged that particular role on too many occasions to be ignored, so much so that we need to question his continued suitability for the job.

Yesterday is was the Parliamentary Ombudsman who brought the issue to glaring light, arguing that something needs to be done about the fact that that none of the cases that the Ombudsman’s office forwarded to the Speaker of the House for action after refusal by the authorities to implement his recommendations have been actively considered by the House.

So it seems that when the Ombudsman recommends action to the government and none is taken, the Ombudsman goes to the Speaker to demand action – to which there is commonly ‘no response whatsoever’.

But perhaps the most damning verdict of all from the Ombudsman was his opinion that ‘the statutory procedure provided for in the Ombudsman Act, which was meant to be a final safeguard to provide redress against injustice to aggrieved citizens, is proving to be ineffective’.

The Ombudsman demands remedial action, and so do we.

This is a most distressing situation when the parliamentary ombudsman bemoans the fact that, not only first the government, but even secondly the Speaker of House himself, is ignoring his decisions and recommendations despite his constitutional role.

This sad state of affairs, in which justice and rule of law is being denied by both the government and the Speaker, as exposed by the Ombudsman yesterday is, however, merely symptomatic of the greater problem that is the Speaker of the House, now into his second legislature as the government’s gatekeeper.

He has not allowed opposition MPs the right to ask questions about the relationship between the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, the infamous Pilatus Bank and the bank’s perhaps even more infamous chairman.  He has also denied opposition MPs the right to ask whether the chief of staff holds an account at Pilatus Bank or one in Dubai.

He has disallowed another asking the Prime Minister to table a list of all the people who have had access to the inquiry, which was also unbelievably disallowed.

Then there was that other question about the chief of staff’s attendance at the bank chief’s wedding.  That too was quashed by the Speaker.

Yes, the Speaker may have ruled against the governing party of which he had formed part for so many years in a number of instances but these questions about the chief of staff have touched a very exposed government nerve and when called upon by the government, the Speaker appears to have paid his dues.

We say ‘appeared’ because we would still like to have faith in the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  But these latest rulings, coupled with the Ombudsman’s report, make such faith difficult to summon.

The state of affairs in which the Speaker of the House of Representatives is effectively serving as the government’s gatekeeper in the government’s time of need is more than wrong, is not only it is an insult to the nation and to the institution of Parliament, but it is also an affront to democracy itself.