Can anybody take Konrad Mizzi seriously anymore? In the midst of major pressure to come clean on his negotiations with Shanghai Electric and Electrogas, he's running around waving bits of paper about photo-voltaic panels and a man who is no longer in government. He needs reminding that he is the one in charge now, that he's the one sitting in the Cabinet of government. It's his decisions and his dealings we are interested in now, most particularly because he himself is not interested in telling us about them.

Mizzi and his boss espouse the theory that attack is the best form of defence. But it isn't really - at least, not always. Sometimes, it just makes you look like an idiot who's trying very hard to save his own skin, and failing. This is the man whose wife is sitting pretty back home in China off €13,000 a month in salary, perks and benefits, all paid for by the electorate. And then he wants that same electorate to be terribly irked because of something an ex minister is supposed to have done when he was a minister, when there is no suggestion, not even by Mizzi himself, that this ex minister took any money for himself or his wife - unlike Konrad Mizzi, whose wife is taking plenty and whose boss has found a way to make that leeching ostensibly legitimate with a rumoured Malta Enterprise contract which they won't release no matter how much we petition them under the Freedom of Information Act.

Gasol plc's annual accounts, published last month, reveal quite clearly that the company is technically insolvent. Its own auditors raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern. There is no sign of any money going in and every sign of millions haemorrhaging out. It looks to me like a laundry operation but then I'm no big expert in these matters and I am quite sure the Minister of Health and Energy knows his way around a calculator far better than I do. And when quizzed by one or two journalists about Gasol's ability to stay in the game, he said that it has funding and therefore we should take his word for it. So that's all right, then.

But aren't we rather missing the point here - the minister and the rest of us? In four months' time, that Gasol power station was meant to be built and commissioned, ready to go. Instead here we are, four months away from D-day, deliberating Gasol's real or fictitious insolvency, and wondering where it's going to get the money to build the power station, while Konrad Mizzi defends the situation with the minimum number of words. He has more words to say about George Pullicino and the PV panels than he does about his Marvellously Disappearing Power Station. Disappearing? That's not quite right, because the power station never appeared in the first place.

That's Gasol and Electrogas. Meanwhile, we haven't a clue what's happening with the other highway on Labour's roadmap: China and its buy-up of much of Malta's power network (power as in electricity, and power as in politicians). The last we heard, those Chinese were refusing to deliver because they wanted to edge out the competition for supply, Electrogas. So suddenly, all those hundreds of millions that Joseph and his mate Konrad thought were going to pour into their increasingly prosperous-looking laps have gone absent without leave, and Joseph is back to touring the globe selling passports for those chaps at Henley in the hope of raising a few millions elsewhere.

It's a remarkable state of affairs whichever way you look at it. How did the big movement for Taghna Lkoll change whittle down into a few unsavoury men trying to grab as much as they can, with Manuel Mallia - whose face and name are everywhere you look in the media - fronting the show as the government's poster-boy? It's a shambles, but the predominant feeling among people is not anger. It is resignation. Muscat and his men should be concerned that there is no frisson of excitement at all - except, of course, among salivating property developers and similar.