The prime minister, confronted by a journalist from this newspaper during a visit to the university, was asked whether John Dalli is still working for the government. This time, there was no 'tu quoque' response because the question came out of the blue and was direct.
"You people have been asking me this same question for ages," he said. Well, no, actually I don't recall anybody asking him that question in a long, long time. You'd think the monster-mess lurking below the surface of things isn't the biggest story to hit this country repeatedly over the last couple of years with its multi-faceted and numerous tentacles. And there's more to come, because it turns out that he made not one but four (at least, those are the ones they know of) secretive trips to the Bahamas while he was EU Commissioner and another one to Singapore - and the Commission has put him under investigation for the lot. As an aside, let's hope for everybody's sake that the John Dalli experience has served as something of a salutary lesson to Karmenu Vella, though somebody will have to translate pour encourager les autres for his benefit.
Another day, another John Dalli- there's enough there to keep a half a newsroom engaged on chasing things up full-time. The interesting thing is that nobody has confronted Dalli himself about what he's up to or was up. While I'm more than happy that somebody has at last asked the prime minister a direct question about whether Dalli is still on his payroll - oh, sorry, didn't Dalli say that he was working for Joseph Muscat for free, reforming the health service for nada? - I would be far happier as a citizen of this country to hear a journalist ask Dalli whether he is on the infamous Mary Swan's payroll. But that story has all the makings of something so huge and shocking that people treat it like a thriller.
Mary Swan is an international fraudster with more than one name and more than one passport. I have a copy of the false The Philippines passport which she used some years back, and for which she was arrested and jailed in Thailand. She's the prime mover in the so-called 'Christian organisation' - the supposed charity that invests in gold mines in Africa and uses the proceeds to build schools for starving little black children. Mary Swan was based out of a flat in Sliema's High Street and might well still be. John Dalli & Associates advised companies to which she was linked.
None of this stopped the prime minister celebrating Dalli defiantly in the Auberge de Castille, with the press called in for the purpose, and announcing that he had been made his special consultant on health, his unofficial health minister.
John Dalli has finished the work he was engaged - last year - to do for the government," the prime minister said, emphasising that 'last year' like somebody in his 20s to whom 'ages ago' means the summer before last, ancient history. So what's all this sudden distancing behaviour about? The prime minister made a point of appointing Dalli to his right hand when the worst of it was already swirling about. Yes, the prime minister was actually defiant in his behaviour; he did it purposely. If he now wants to be seen as having pushed him aside, when he was so keen last year to support him, it's either just being done for the sake of the public eye, while the relationship will carry on in private - as with, one suspects, Shiv Nair - or there is something far worse going on than even the best-informed can possibly imagine.
The fact that no journalist is ever going to get much joy from confronting Dalli with questions about his quite amazing behaviour, or the slew of investigations by OLAF, does not mean that no questions should be put to him at all. His absolute refusal to answer questions by the press, despite the fact that he was quite happy to take public money as a government minister and EU Commissioner - in salary and benefits, I hasten to add - is a story in itself.
This newspaper challenged John Dalli with questions about the fresh OLAF probe, but he stonewalled them. He can't say it's none of our business, because it most certainly is. Perhaps Karmenu Vella will now take him on as a consultant. After all, if the prime minister of Malta can do that, why can't an EU Commissioner? Oh I see, our standards our lower. No such thing as a big scandal in Malta. We prefer the little ones, because we think small and are petty. We can get our heads round a homemade clock, but the magnitude of the investigations into Dalli's activities, of those activities themselves, is beyond our intellectual and moral capacity to understand.