As expected, the home stretch of this incredibly protracted election campaign that we have now entered has begun to liven up to more than a certain extent, with cross-party accusations of lies and half truths coming a dime a dozen.

We have had a dubiously-sourced recording, which are also of dubious legality and of dubious timing, being used left, right and centre to incriminate Labour deputy leader Toni Abela, and another recording showing GWU leader Tony Zarb making unsavoury pledges to a contractor should a Labour administration be the next to lead the country.

There should be no bones made about it, what Mr Zarb had promised is simply not on, especially in this day and age. And Dr Abela’s decision to not go to the police when, as he said in the recording, he had evidence of drug dealing, in evidently class A drugs, at one of the party clubs for which he is responsible, irrespective of the “trouble” it could have caused the party, should definitely not be on either.

After all, his fellow deputy leader Louis Grech and Labour leader Joseph Muscat himself have both said they would have handled the situation ‘differently’ had they been confronted with it. By differently, it is to be assumed that they would have gone to the police at the first instance, rather than simply expelling the culprit and letting him continue with the practice elsewhere.

Any which way you look at it, both of these instances have caused the Labour Party untold harm, but whether Mr Zarb should resign from his post is a matter that should be left up to the union itself, and the same goes for Dr Abela, whose party needs to deal with the consequences and face, or not face, the music for his lapse.

It does, however, need to be mentioned that these recordings being bandied about so freely on the Internet, in the media and by politicians are particularly nasty pieces of work.  That is because recording someone without their knowledge, and news media repeating those unreliably sourced recordings is of very questionable legality. But such is our fascination with sleaze that we seem to not even question such matters.

Quite irrespective of whatever Dr Abela and Mr Zarb said in those recordings, they both have a good possibility of legal recourse here. After all, if such recordings of private conversations are allowed and are actually condoned by politicians, where exactly will it all stop? In this day and age, anyone with a simple smartphone is able to record just about any conversation they are privy to in some way, shape or form with the simple push of a button inside a pocket. 

As for the Austin Gatt emails, this is another story altogether. The Austin Gatt emails do not show any particular corrupt activity but as we have shown in an article on our front page, his attempts to rubbish the emails as ‘frame-ups’ have fallen flat.

But that does not make him guilty of anything in particular – that will be a matter for the police to ascertain, and the fact that with the Cabinet having approved, word for word as we report in another story, the text of the presidential pardon drafted by the Attorney General, the Commissioner of Police and the legal representatives of oil trader George Farrugia shows at least a willingness on the part of the government to set the record straight through the appropriate channels.

But Dr Gatt’s attempts to show a smoking gun yesterday, as we have shown, are quite erroneous. That does not imply guilt on the minister’s part, not by any means.  What it shows is that this issue will not go away quite as easily as some may hope.

It should also be made perfectly clear that first of all, there is nothing illegal about an agent taking a commission, from the oil companies, for oil sales to Enemalta.  This is common practice and there is nothing untoward about that in itself.

But of course, the problem is that it is the perception of wrongdoing that usually counts in these matters of public opinion, not the facts. 

The problem would theoretically arise when someone else was included in that commission ring – a minister or officials at Enemalta. And nothing of the sort has been proved at all. But it is hoped that, with the exonerated oil trader now having been speaking with the police for about a week, that something will surface one way or another in the very near future. These are not issues that people should be taking with them to the voting booths – the people deserve, and need, answers to this and all the other lingering questions sooner rather than later.

That is why somewhere, somehow, something is going to have to give. The people deserve better than these cloak and dagger games, sleight of hand tricks and personal attacks. There are far too many questions and far too few answers for anyone to make any sort of educated decision when it comes to polling time.