The biggest culture shock one can get in Malta is the move from the private sphere to the public one.

Moving in the opposite direction, from the public domain to the private one, is many times accompanied by cries of joy and hosannas just as though it is liberation.

In theory, both the culture shock and the freedom surge should not be there at all and in a democracy that functions as such, it should be as easy for a normal citizen to move into the public eye as it is to move out of it.

However, realistically, the two spheres are light years away from each other. Even the classical Romans, who knew a thing or two about statecraft and had a sense of statehood, established many levels of qualification before one could aspire to public service and even then, as history tells us, they too succumbed to dictatorship and corruption.

It is however in the interest of any country, let alone small Malta, to get the best it can get from the most valid of its citizens. There is a very clear risk that people may be dissuaded from public service by the glaring light that is shed on each and every move they make once they are in the public eye.

The good news is that, despite all these forbidding omens, such a move can be done and has been done, and is done even now. Malta’s great tradition of an independent judiciary, for instance, one of the best things we inherited from British rule, has been a brilliant history of service to the nation, many times carried out by people with a sense of the State and of duty above the ordinary.

So too the Civil Service, though the long Mintoff years, where partisanship ruled above competence, turned most of the service into purely mechanical implementers of the ministerial diktats.

The present administration, ever since 1987, has been trying to remove ministerial diktats, to promote civil service autonomy and the autonomy of the bodies and authorities it set up in great multitudes. One cannot say it has succeeded and one can even say this government tends to revert to the ministerial diktat format of such bad repute in the past.

The resignation of Gordon Cordina as Director General of the National Statistics Office sends bad signals all over the place, and in different directions too.

On the one hand, anybody moving from private to public service should expect to be subjected to public and media scrutiny unthought of in the private sphere. Qualification for public service must include having a tough skin, as magistrates, civil servants and indeed ministers themselves know. As a now-dead judge, revered for his integrity, used to say: In this position one must be careful not just of what one does but also of any perceptions one can give.

The government and its media plus some bodies have now come out condemning what they call the Labour Party’s witch-hunt. Certainly, if Labour did set out to target Dr Cordina in a way the public perceived to be unfair, the party itself would have rendered itself obnoxious in the public eye.

In a way it did and the PN claim that this is the kind of retribution that will be meted out by a Labour government to all those who crossed it and especially to those who undermined its No vote campaign in 2003, is especially telling. This area, like that which offers “justice” to all disgruntled voters, is very thin ice for Labour especially on the threshold of an election.

At the same time, however, there have been other people who have moved from the public sphere to the private one, and who do not seem to have had this kind of adverse reaction. And certainly Dr Cordina should have been prepared for this media and partisan intrusiveness on his personal and family affairs without deciding to up and leave.

Most of the criticism he faced regarded not his past but his present, not his acknowledged professional stature, but the way he was perceived as managing the NSO especially in the revised figures issue.

By coming in, as he did, and leaving so soon, he has left NSO still struggling to justify each and any of its statistics. Will it now continue to revise its figures, a procedure Dr Cordina himself termed as “normal” or will it stop doing so leaving us all wondering who was right?