The saga of the bit of mouse in a midwife’s salad has now moved beyond the ridiculous. It is essentially a comic story of very minor significance, but has been fanned into a national catastrophe by the combination of a furiously inadequate opposition party, reporters who are at a loss for real stories in early September, and a population the greater part of which is entirely devoid of a sense of humour, and whose reaction to “dirt”, except in public spaces, is disproportionate because for centuries they lived mired in it. This has bred the mentality that it is necessary to distance oneself with dramatic gestures from the merest suggestion of dirt so as to be thought clean.

The accusation that the bad press is fuelled by partisan politics is correct – l-orizzont mocked up a picture of a whole mouse served up on a bed of salad like a king prawn – but it is fanned by our strange preoccupation with the minor details of life and our inability to put things into perspective. A tiny bit of mouse in a midwife’s salad in a hospital canteen keeps us talking in appalled tones for days. The news that next year is going to be a very bad one for tourism, because the British economy is in turmoil, is something we just blank out. We’re sure it will sort itself out somehow, unlike the bit of mouse in the salad, which is a much bigger problem.

Of course, a bit of mouse in a hospital canteen salad is just what the Labour Party needs. It diverts attention from the fact that the Labour leader is still fooling around three months after he was elected, pretending to be far too busy to take on the constitutional role of Opposition Leader. He’s not too busy to go out to dinner – he was there at the next table the other day, he’s not too busy to socialise, not too busy to scuttle around appointing various committees and commissions to clear out the party cupboards, not too busy to listen to Sammy Meilaq and Tony Zarb down at the shipyard, and not too busy to see through new rules that will have recalcitrant Labour MEPs fined e15,000 for speaking their mind rather than parroting the party line. Yet he’s too busy, we are told, to take the oath as Opposition Leader.

The line is fed to us that it’s because he’s writing that VAT report for his current employers – a fine excuse, as my headmistress would have told me before sending me home for the day. But really, given that he’s up to something and in the news almost every day, rather than holed up in his garret with a laptop tapping away, we are beginning to suspect what is far more likely to be the truth: that the reason he’s hasn’t become Opposition Leader is because he hasn’t got a seat in parliament, and the tussles over who is going to give up his seat to make way for him have not been resolved yet. Muscat can’t become Opposition Leader without that seat, and the delay is making it increasingly clear that the negotiations to wrest a seat off somebody else are proving tougher than expected.

I imagine that Muscat must have envisaged a procession of members of parliament ready to sacrifice themselves for the great white hope of the Labour Party, asking for nothing in return, their virtue being its own reward. People with a sense of entitlement tend to think that way, and Muscat is not the self-effacing sort. He must have discovered rather too late that this was more than a little bit naïve, because altruism is a rare quality in politics, despite the propaganda to the contrary.

If nobody came forward to volunteer their seat, then it would have become necessary to demand of somebody that he sacrifices himself. But of course, our constitution does not allow for that: as amply illustrated by the Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando case, members of parliament are autonomous and their seats are their own and not the party’s. A member of parliament cannot be bullied into resigning his seat or swopping it for something else; the constitution protects him, and so it should be.

I am surprised that the ramifications of Joseph Muscat’s very difficult situation have not been more widely discussed. They have not, in fact, been discussed at all, except in passing. It seems to have been taken for granted that a seat will be found for him, and a solution spun by magic out of thin air. This is not just optimistic. It betrays a quaint and rather touching faith in the altruism of those who have toiled, schemed and plotted, kissed babies and sucked up to the geriatric, promised street-lighting and pavements and even jobs, scoured the constituency for every last vote, only to then throw it all away for the scant reward of giving their seat to Joseph Muscat. I wouldn’t do it. Would you? Exactly – so you can rest assured that this is precisely the reaction of every last one of those Labour MPs, and I’m with them on that. Why on earth should somebody throw his hard work down the gutter just so that Muscat, who spent the last four years furthering his personal ambitions in Brussels, can get a free ride on his back to further even more of those ambitions?

The only option left to Muscat is a combination of persuasion and leverage, called negotiation. If you give me your seat, I will make it worth your while. But as every seasoned negotiator knows, when somebody has the very thing you want, when you want it at all costs because without it you cannot reach your essential goals, and when the other person has no interest in giving it to you, it is not enough to offer in return something that is of equal value to him as his seat. What you must offer is what the seat is worth to you, and not what the seat is worth to him. And that seat, as we know, is invaluable to Joseph Muscat because without it he has no chance of becoming Opposition Leader, still less Prime Minister. At this stage in the game, it is worth everything to him outside his family, and anyone who is capable of getting enough votes to secure a parliamentary seat knows that.

Joseph Muscat is, in negotiating terms, in the weakest of all possible positions because he needs something that somebody else has, and this “somebody else” has no equivalent need or desire to give it to him. The stakes are very, very high and are being driven higher still by the fact that time is running out, which piles the pressure on Muscat and weakens his negotiating position quite dramatically, while strengthening the position of the person with the seat. To get that seat, he will have to offer something quite extraordinary in return, or find an absolute sucker to give it to him with his blessing, which is most unlikely. I trust he is not counting on the shocking and deeply upsetting fate that has befallen Karl Chircop to serve as his deus ex machina. That would be quite revolting, and an ominous start to his parliamentary career.

As for that mouse, we really could do without the high drama. Nobody ever died or got a disease from the skeletal part-cranium of a mouse, in a salad or elsewhere. Mice, unlike rats, are not carriers of infection dangerous to humans – no more than rabbits or hamsters are. Mouse faeces or urine might be different, though only disgusting rather than dangerous, but nobody is suggesting that any has been found in the food preparation facilities. I think that the government’s way of dealing with this situation has been quite extraordinary and severely disproportionate, a hysterical instant reaction rather than a considered decision rooted in commonsense. Shutting down the canteen for weeks with no end in sight has not only inconvenienced the people who eat there, but has also caused, I would think, serious financial problems to the people who run it. But then we all know that the general approach to businesses is that they turn on taps out of which money flows, so they can be expected to cope with any degree of assault.

The most disturbing thing is that sabotage has not been ruled out, which means that the consequences being endured by the hospital staff and the canteen-operators may be the work of somebody with a grudge or even just a practical joke to which, given the magnitude of the results, nobody will ever dare own up now. It doesn’t take much strategy or effort to go to a restaurant with a cockroach in your pocket and let it loose, or plant its corpse in your plate. People have done it for a laugh before, and they will do it again.

I’m not saying that the midwife who found it did this, of course. I’m saying that it might have been done to her, or just done to nobody in particular. I’m pointing out how easy it is to do these things and cause chaos and disruption. Oh, and something else: the president of the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses has said that the midwife is still in shock and on leave of absence from the workplace, a full 10 days after the discovery in her salad. He says that she will probably need counselling. I read this on the flight back to Malta and gave serious consideration to getting back on another plane as soon as I landed.

Midwives spend their entire working lives seeing the sort of gruesome things that make grown men pass out: body parts, women’s orifices ripping as babies force their way out, blood, guts, placentas, excrement on the sheets, emergency caesareans, babies born dead or dying, late-stage miscarriages – and that’s just the midwifery bit, not the general nursing bit that they must go through first before specialising, everything from cleaning infected wounds to slopping out the bedpans of those with a malfunctioning digestive system, to tidying up the badly mutilated corpses of accident victims. I find it hard to believe that somebody who has seen and done all that is unable to cope with a bit of mouse-head in her salad, instead of tossing it away, and getting on with it.

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