Maybe this is an apposite historical precedent: when Emperor Caligula appointed his own horse to be consul.

The recent cull in Malta’s foreign service and the lock, stock and barrel replacement of most of them by party activists, simply beggars belief.

This was long foreseen in whispers and rumours, augmented when suddenly the need was announced of a full audit of all embassies as if these harboured all sorts of fraudsters and corrupt officials.

The report, presented last week to the minister by its compilers, has yet to be published, if ever it will be. One eagerly awaits it, and also for some information on the professional abilities of the members of this commission.

Then came the cull: not many seem to have survived it, and possibly the axe still has to fall on those who so far have escaped it.

It was only Alternattiva which woke up to the danger: in its statement on Saturday, through its new chairperson Arnold Cassola, it deplored the ‘humiliation’ of career diplomats.

AD said: “The novelty now is that some of these political appointees are substituting career diplomats. This is totally unacceptable not only because it is depriving people who are academically and professionally specialised in this field from their deserved advancement in career, but also because it is depriving our country of the best people in this area just to satisfy the ambitions and whims of certain party hacks whose only qualification is their servility towards their political master of the day.”

It is a pity that PN was so late in reacting to this development that it sent its statement quite late on Saturday evening and as a result the two main English-language papers on Sunday did not carry it.

This cull and its replacement appointments have taken us light years back, to when people were appointed to such posts purely for partisan considerations.

The PN administrations did, in their times, appoint political members of the nomenklatura, but even so they were of a considerably higher quality.

To represent your country in an important capital city is a signal honour and one that requires gravitas and responsibility.

The later PN administrations had also shifted from political nominees to career diplomats through the fostering of properly-trained persons with background and preparation, thus pushing the professionalisation of the foreign service, which is a huge step forward for the country as a whole.

The country had come a long way from the primitive times of Dom Mintoff where the real foreign diplomacy was waged from Castille and the staff at embassies abroad were little better than cifre-clerks.

Then there is the sheer lack of quality of most of the new appointees. Only one, maybe two, of the appointees could pass muster in any chancellery. The rest are … well, like Caligula’s horses. Appointed just because the emperor so decreed, precisely because of their inadequacy, their lack of worth, just to show who’s the master.

One must also look at this from a very different point of view. Let’s take it for granted the new administration has every right to appoint people of its own persuasion (forget for a moment the Malta taghna lkoll rigmarole). Let’s also assume the new administration has every right to remove all career diplomats. Still, one finds it very hard to understand how Labour could not find better people in its midst than this motley crew it has chosen.

This is precisely the anger that has crept in among many people who genuinely voted Labour last March to get a real change in the country only to see a throwback to the worst times of the PL’s 1980s.