Any slight possibility, small as it might have been, that the PN could still win the coming election were wiped out, I think, with the revelations regarding Richard Cachia Caruana’s total salary.

I believe it is a fundamental principle of any news handling that if you have bad news concerning you, you go ahead and release it yourself, rather than let your adversaries do it.

The government notoriously did not do this when it had to deal with the €500 a week increase the ministers gave themselves, and that became one major reason why people turned away from the government in disgust.

Now there is this Richard Cachia Caruana issue. The government knew about it, since Leo Brincat had long been asking for details both in the Foreign Affairs Committee and as a parliamentary question, yet it delayed till the last minute. Then, at two minutes to eight in the evening, as the Prime Minister was finishing replying to many questions regarding the previous week’s summit, the DOI took the unusual step of issuing a press release carrying the entire parliamentary reply.

The reply itself is vintage Lawrence Gonzi: lots of arguments and statements of fact first; the punch came in the last line when Leo Brincat’s question was answered: €115,000 per annum.

It brings to mind the spirited defence Dr Gonzi had made of the €500 a week increase but the country well remembers how for all that defence, this increase was later removed when the PN government came under the Franco Debono onslaught.

Now it may be argued, and I agree wholeheartedly, that the way Cachia Caruana was removed from office was one of the most dastardly decisions taken by this legislature.

I believe that the Clerk of the House should never have accepted the Opposition motion, nor the discussion by the Speaker since it regarded a person who was not an elected minister and so was not accountable to the House as ministers are. Even though Cachia Caruana held a seat in Cabinet and sits on the PN strategy core group.

This was a political vendetta by one government member, JPO, aided and abetted by the entire Labour Opposition with no one among them having any qualms about the legitimacy and even ethical connotations of the issue.

I also believe the parliamentary vote should have been challenged in front of the Constitutional Court much as Charles Demicoli successfully challenged a parliamentary decision all the way up to Strasbourg.

But having successfully got Cachia Caruana out of the way, the Labour Opposition, specifically Leo Brincat who had been particularly critical in the Foreign Affairs Committee and whose remit regards the environment and such matters, not foreign affairs, not EU affairs, not government employees, went for the jugular: how much was Mr Cachia Caruana getting?

In a way, this is the politics of envy, and deleterious as it is, it is always and invariably effective. It is distasteful that a party has to come to that, but there you are: as soon as people got to know the Cabinet had given itself a rise they were not given, all hell broke loose.

As for Richard Cachia Caruana’s salary, the Prime Minister’s explanation is valid up to a point, but it also raises questions.

Before I go any further, I must state that I believe that Mr Cachia Caruana is a very able person who has a hugely organized brain and an immense ability to get the wide picture while going into the details and the minutiae of any issue.

Through his unstinting hard work, Malta has done well in the EU. Its levels of infractions of the manifold EU rules are down compared to other countries, its levels of accession and absorption of EU funds are quite good, and Mr Cachia Caruana’s role defending the interests of Air Malta in the recent Commission approval of the government aid to it has been central.

Nor is his salary in any remarkable by EU standards. He is no Bob Diamond playing around with Barclays funds. Nor is he a banker with an obscene remuneration and bonus. The Prime Minister’s statement explains very well how the package came to be as it is.

But by Maltese standards the package is out of this world. This talk about packages where people negotiate really puts me off. I do not know if Mr Cachia Caruana’s had the best package in Malta and I am sure, I say again, he gave the country more than it gave him. Being Perm Rep in Brussels is no walk in the park.

However, with hindsight, I have two points I wish to make.

First of all, it is absolutely clear that Mr Cachia Caruana was always the best person to take that role. Now that the government is looking around for a replacement, I can quite understand the huge difficulty it is facing (also taking into consideration the proximity of the election). The fact he was always the best, and the sole candidate for the job, however, turns the issue into a very different state of affairs had there been real competition.

Secondly, one reason for his package such as it is, was the fact that he had two roles: that of Perm Rep and that of government consultant on EU affairs. I accept the two roles dovetailed into each other and that the alternative to that might have been confusion as to roles and as to advice (such as we may probably get with a Labour government).

But Dr Gonzi’s basic reasoning − that Mr Cachia Caruana’s salary looks generous but in reality if the job were to be done by two people it would cost more − is rather specious. Any worker, any employee, why, even any housewife, would tell you that such an alternative would always cost more, but is that always true?

I think this whole sad saga is yet another sign that the Gonzi years are coming to an end. Like Richard Cachia Caruana, Lawrence Gonzi assumed many roles. They are both very crucial nodes in the running of the country. Both suffer fools with great difficulty and both seem to think they know it all. Both find huge difficulty in dealing and working with people who do not share their ideas and ideals. Both are very comfortable with each other but hardly with many others. Both are huge bottlenecks in the system.

As it is, and this is the culminating irony of it all, it had to be a rogue parliamentary majority to oust Mr Cachia Caruana while the coming election may show us that the country will oust Dr Gonzi because it cannot stand his being a bottleneck. Mr Cachia Caruana may not think about it like this but he may have got off lightly.

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