The Labour internet elves, who in the last general election were Sliema housewives refusing to vote for intollerant (two Ls) Gonzi because of the price of electricity, are back in force. And this time they’re passionate about gay issues and refusing to vote for intolerant (they’ve since learned how to spell it) Gonzi

Now they’ve taken a brief and sudden break from learning how to spell ‘heterosexual’ – why bother, when you can write ‘str8t’ – to put about the lie that Cyrus Engerer was busted for downloading pornography at home. And because now we’re all liberal and the 1960s have hit certain parts of Maltese society at last, pornography is what ‘everybody’ does for fun and Gonzi still “lags tollerence”.

So let’s get one thing straight (str8t?) before we start on the hot topic of the moment. Cyrus Engerer was not busted for downloading pornography. He was busted for taking some naked sex photographs he had of his ex-lover Marvic Camilleri, and emailing them out to various friends and associates including, it appears, Mr Camilleri’s employers, as an act of vengeance after the relationship ended.

He was busted not because anybody in the Nationalist Party tipped off the police. He was busted because the man featured in the private naked sex photographs – his former lover – put in a formal request to the police (known in Maltese as a ‘kwerela’) to investigate and act. His lawyers, the ones who made this formal request on his behalf and followed it up, are former policemen and active members of the Labour Party, Vince Micallef and Andy Ellul. They are often seen and photographed with Joseph Muscat, and Vince Micallef is part of a close circle of friends who include Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and is a regular visitor at the home of Robert Musumeci and Magistrate Herrera. This is not to implicate any of them in anything or in any way, but the facts have to be laid out.

Shortly after the report was made last year, insinuations and unveiled threats began to be made against Cyrus Engerer via a poisonous and anonymous pro-Labour website which was set up for the declared purpose of threatening people and slandering them. They were along the lines of “we know something about you, Cyrus and you’d better watch out and behave or we’ll release the information at the appropriate moment” (the language, however, was garbled). I remember reading them and thinking how liberal and progressive Labour can’t get past the ‘pufta’ mindset despite its best efforts.

Now those posts have been deleted, though there are still cached traces which point to their one-time existence.

So why was Mr Engerer charged so long after the report was made? The internet elves, believing that everybody is as half-brained as they are, would have it that the Nationalist Party pounced and instructed the police to act when he left them. Apart from the fact that that reasoning stems from the same mindset as ‘if you leave me I’ll circulate dirty pictures of you as revenge’, it just doesn’t make sense. First, the Nationalist Party – or government – can’t instruct the police in any such way. Secondly, if even an internet ‘elve’ is able to work out the obvious conclusions of such hellishly stupid behaviour, then rest assured that so can the Nationalist Party. And thirdly, it’s telling that the elves are more shocked by the idea that the Nationalist Party/police pounced out of revenge than by the implication therein: that the Nationalist Party/police protected him by failing to act for so long.

The place to look for the reasons why this happened is within the police force, and the Police Commissioner has done the right thing in asking the prime minister to hold a formal inquiry.

The fact remains that Cyrus Engerer was interrogated by the police while his star was in the ascendant at the Nationalist Party, when he spoke at the party’s general conference in June. He concealed the fact of his interrogation from the party bosses. Then, on 9 July he spoke to the police and asked them to expedite proceedings against him. Six days later, he rang the press and told them he was resigning from the Nationalist Party and moving to Labour. Then the story about his arraignment broke, as he knew it would because he had asked the police to speed things up.

Some might see the Labour Party as being hoist by its own petard in having prised away a ‘trophy gay’ from the Nationalists only to have him explode. But I find it hard to believe that Joseph Muscat and his key people did not know about the police complaint filed by his ex-lover, given some of the people involved. What I think is this: that Cyrus Engerer was deliberately prised away and deliberately blown up, though it remains to be seen by whom, and that driven by what is apparently a streak of self-sabotage, Mr Engerer himself participated in his own destruction, not least – if the allegations are true – with the spiteful act of making a lover’s private pictures public.