Considering the per-capita-defying number of newspapers – independent, pseudo-independent, partisan and not – we have had and continue to have on these islands, it has always intrigued me why we have never had the traditional parliamentary sketch so popular in the UK press, though, even there, the stage has been brusquely moved to television and the Internet. In fact, such sketches, or cousins of theirs, are today written and consumed on a daily basis across the vast and endless fields of a thriving blog world.

Still, given our national obsession with politics, the Maltese media has never really taken to this wonderful way of dealing with Parliament and parliamentarians, and the few feeble attempts that there have been in the past misfired completely as both the intended targets, again Parliament and parliamentarians, were not too amused, while on the other hand, the journalists involved were either not too convinced or hardly encouraged – to use a more subtle word – to pursue the art form.

With a new Parliament about to be inaugurated in a few weeks’ time, perhaps it is also propitious someone did give it a good try. Maltese journalists and their readers have grown in confidence, while most newspaper owners have, generally speaking, happily lost their time-honoured hesitation when it comes to criticising and taking the mickey out of politics and politicians. There is, after all, one reality: it is either that or eventual closure. Interactive television and the Internet are quickly digging tunnels into their precious territories.

To my mind at least, the parliamentary sketch as a journalistic work of art will forever be associated with Frank Johnson, the former Spectator magazine editor and columnist, who died in December 2006, and who will be remembered by lovers of British journalism for his claim that the most memorable thing that happened to him was when Maria Callas stuck her nipple into his left eye. It was in 1957, and he was 14 at the time. His class at an East End secondary modern school supplied child extras for Covent Garden opera productions, and the great soprano swept him into her embrace in one of the climactic scenes of Bellini’s Norma, after she had decided not to kill him, but to sing a duet instead.

Johnson went on to become the funniest parliamentary sketchwriter of his generation; but he really believed that opera was worth more. The piece he wrote 25 years later about his brief stage career concluded: “Still, there are few men who can truthfully say that their eye made contact with the right nipple of Maria Callas. So it is not necessarily true that someone who has passed much of his adult life in the press gallery of the House of Commons has never glimpsed greatness.”

Johnson trained with several east London newspapers until, in 1969, he reached Fleet Street via The Sun, then in its pre-Thatcher Labour-supporting phase. He was on the political staff for three years. His politics had been those of his family: tribal Labour and lower-case conservative. The bare bosoms in The Sun caused him some difficulty at home, and he would sometimes have to remove the whole of page three before his mother saw it. He would tell her that the printers had refused to print it, something not wholly incredible in the old-fashioned Fleet Street. But much to the chagrin of his growing army of admirers on the Left, yours truly included, later in his career he moved sharply to the Right.

In 1972, the Daily Telegraph hired him as a leader writer and parliamentary sketchwriter, where he stayed till 1979. The Telegraph shared sketch writing between Johnson, and John O’Sullivan, who wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher. Later, other leader writers were added, such as Edward Pearce. At one stage, four people were contending for the slot; two of them, turning up in Parliament on the same day, came to blows in the press gallery. Wouldn’t you give your right arm (easy for me, I’m left-handed) to see such a rare happening inside our own House of Representatives?

Johnson’s writing style was like a boxer’s, quick and brutal. He never lost sight of his target. Most sketchwriters are happy to find a joke – any joke – and do not much care where it takes them. Johnson had the invention and self-discipline to concentrate his jokes, and in his best sketches they came like combination punches, beating on to the same place from unexpected directions.

An example of the self-restraint, and its rewards, came when Elaine Kellet-Bowman, then a Conservative MP, demanded an emergency debate on “an Indian terrorist group which practises homosexuality and ritual murder”. This on its own would have been enough for most sketch-writers, who were always dreadfully pressed for time; but Johnson stayed to the end of the debate, and was rewarded with a wonderfully stupid speech from a Labour MP, whom he treated with exemplary brutality: “Mr (Peter) Doig (then Labour MP for Dundee West) wanted criminals treated in the same way that they treated their victims. For example, those who threw acid in people’s faces should have acid thrown in theirs. When his Labour colleagues protested, he explained that he was not saying that such sentences should be compulsory, but just an option available to judges. While agreeing in principle with this admirable speech, one saw certain practical difficulties. For example, how would Mr Doig’s policy apply in the case of rapists? Also, a call for volunteers to punish, in kind, Indian homosexual ritual murderers might attract undesirable elements.”

In 1979 Frank Johnson accepted a lot of money to move to Sir James Goldsmith’s lavish “Now” magazine, for which, for little money, I corresponded from Malta. We met, through mutual friends in London, on a couple of occasions before the magazine folded two years later as a result of massive sales decreases. Johnson went back to his parliamentary sketches, assuming higher editorial posts, this time for The Times and then the Sunday Telegraph until his sad demise. He was only 63.

This new Maltese Parliament promises a lot. It will again have to deal with a jittery government, a one-seat majority, disgruntled ex-ministers, trigger-happy new ministers, deflated ex-back-benchers and star-struck new back-benchers and, after 5 June, a new Opposition leader. New and not so new exciting things are bound to happen.

Young, up-and-coming journalists of whichever political colour and hue can have the fun of their working lives sketching these events for their readers. Rather than a minefield, editors would do well to consider it a timely bonanza when the sands of time seem to be shifting rather too rapidly towards the electronic media.

There is still, however, a place for the parliamentary sketch in the Maltese press; ripe is the word. But is there anyone willing and able to take up the long-overdue challenge it provides in this new, exciting legislature about to get under way?