Hannes Swoboda, the head of the socialist group in the European Parliament, has weighed in for the Malta Labour Party by telling the press that “it would make sense to wait for the result of the next general elections in Malta, which are due to be held in the coming months, before a new European Commissioner is nominated (by Malta)”

It’s none of his business though, is it? Foreign interference and all that – and here I use the dialectic favoured by Labour itself. Also, Mr Swoboda doesn’t seem to be at all in the loop. He is apparently unaware that John Dalli is a Labour Party man, forever on the Labour Party’s television station running down the government and the Nationalist Party.

Lawrence Gonzi’s considerably ill-judged appointment he was, but Joseph Muscat’s sordid ally he has turned out to be today.

So, Labour’s man – a favourite of Norman Hamilton and Joe Grima and various other Super One TV fossils – has been forced to resign after an extensive corruption investigation, and now Labour’s allies in Brussels and Strasbourg want Malta to wait so that Labour can put another of their people in.

What matters, now, is that whoever replaces John Dalli is squeaky clean and good at the job. John Dalli should never have gone. The prime minister should never have nominated him. That wrong done, the Labour Party should not have compounded the situation and sought to take advantage of it, by giving the man the time of day, and as much air-time on its television station as he wanted.

It shouldn’t take a woman to sniff out a bad man at 60 paces. There was and is too much about Dalli that is wrong, and I’m not talking about the corruption investigations here, or about OLAF’s report, which only the Attorney-General will see here in Malta. I’m talking about his behaviour, his constant, droning self-pity and his attacks on the party and government of which he once formed part.

It is not because he attacked the Nationalist Party and the government relentlessly that I say this. Please don’t miss the point. It is because this behaviour points to a serious deficiency in his character, and the Labour Party, which does include at least some mature and perceptive individuals (though I can’t quite see where they’re hiding) should have been able to see this. People of poor and dubious character will always let you down in the end, even if they are serving your purpose now.

So it turns out that Dalli didn’t resign voluntarily. He was asked to do so by Jose Manuel Barroso. Why am I not surprised? As he himself said, it’s all so much déjà vu. I think we have to confront the fact that what we are dealing with here is vastly different standards of behaviour. Maybe this kind of thing is acceptable in Malta (it certainly looks like it from where I’m standing) and so this may have led John Dalli and Silvio Zammit (known to all Sliema natives as Ta’ Peppi tal-Mqaret ta’ Ħdejn it-Taormina Kiosk) to think it’s acceptable everywhere else, too. Why else would Zammit have had his transactions recorded for posterity in emails?

And straight away, of course, the cry has gone up from Labour supporters, who have been force-fed John Dalli over the last couple of years, and from Dalli’s own little army of die-hard fans, that he has been framed. Framed by whom? By OLAF? By Silvio Zammit? I think those people had better get a grip on themselves.

From what I know of Zammit, who used to fry my mqaret and bag them up with a smile and a wink in his little wooden kiosk down on the Sliema front, he is unlikely to be up to speed on the Swedish tobacco industry, on the Swedish tobacco product called snus, or on EU tobacco directives. I’d say he was the appointed go-between. The thing is that none of us have seen OLAF’s report, which goes straight to the Attorney-General, and none of us is likely to do so. So unless the Attorney-General decides under Maltese law that there are grounds for prosecution (and Maltese law isn’t that great on these matters), then we are not going to find out.

There is one thing I do know for certain: That anybody who touches John Dalli at this stage, even with the proverbial barge-pole, must have some kind of screw loose. Do you read me, Labour?