Those Italians…they can really be too much. One of their judges has now ruled that if you tell a man he has “no balls”, you’re committing a crime.

That’s right, a crime. The reason? It offends male pride. Judge Maurizio Fumo – let’s face it, you can’t imagine a woman judge doing anything other than laugh – said: “It refers not only to the target’s lack of virility but also to his weakness of character, lack of determination, competence and coherence – virtues that, rightly or wrongly, are still identified as pertaining to the male gender.” The prosecutor argued that it had been suggested that the target is “worth less than other men because he doesn’t have the attributes”.

Believe it or not, there wasn’t a woman involved. The two men who had that row are a lawyer and a justice of the peace, and the insults flew in the courtroom – where else but southern Italy. No wonder some of our more tedious politicians feel so very much at home there.

Isn’t it spectacularly ironic? The man who denied fair trials to thousands, who helped murder thousands to shore up his father’s evil regime, is now protesting that he wants to be tried in the Netherlands and not in Libya, where he won’t be able to get a fair trial.

Seif Al Gaddafi’s lawyers have filed a petition on his behalf with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, saying that if he is tried in Libya, it will amount to murder. “There will certainly be no justice in the case if the prosecution is based on evidence from torture.” Well, what can we say? We have been through this before with Saddam Hussein. The same arguments still apply. While it would have been easier all round and made far more sense to leave those people in the hands of their victims, as this man’s father was, as the Ceaucescus were, and as Mussolini famously was too (that one is for all his fans still living in Malta), we have to draw a deep breath and prove to ourselves that we are very civilised and will not countenance such things.

Fortunately, we were spared the trial of Muammar Gaddafi himself, justice having taken its ugly course in another way entirely.

The Times has said, in its leading article yesterday, that Malta does not need a new parliament house. I expect people who know little or nothing about the symbolism of democracy, or the status of democracy among a free population, to talk such rot. But I do not expect The Times, which 33 years ago was razed by a fire set by an anti-democratic mob, to talk such rot.

Parliament house is the ultimate symbol of democracy; it is the totem of a people’s achievement in that regard, the symbol of their freedom and their right to self-determination. In the world’s greatest, oldest and proudest democracies, parliament house is invariably one of the most important and imposing buildings, generally situated somewhere strategic so that it can be seen clearly – in a major square, for instance, or on the River Thames, or on something called Parliament Hill.

It says a great deal about Malta’s insufficient grasp of democracy that in all these decades we have never seen fit to build a parliament house, making do instead with a set of rooms inside the old symbol of power: the palazz tas-sultan. And still there are some influential people – like the leader-writers of The Times – who think that enshrining our own hard-won democracy, weak though it is thanks to our southern Mediterranean heritage, in a proud building dedicated to the purpose is a waste of money, and something we can afford to do without.

There are moments when I fall into thinking that democracy in Malta has been little more than pearls cast before swine, but then I console myself with the knowledge that others have had the advantage of centuries on us. We’re getting a parliament house at last, and what’s more, it’s by Renzo Piano. So there’s a start. I’ll worry when a mob sets fire to it with those who work there still inside – you know, like they did to The Times.

So while we’re on the subject, why did The Times feel the need to house its printing-press in an impressive new building on a main highway, when it cost so much money in these straitened times and it could have operated out of a set of sheds? Who knows – perhaps it’s because printing-presses, too, are symbols of democracy and they should be loud and proud.