A lot of people seem to be watching the ongoing tragic farce involving the government and its police minister as just that: a tragic farce on some stage or screen. But this is real life. While humour and irony, jokes and memes, help us cope with the harsh reality that these are the people we have elected to govern us, and who we will not get a chance to remove before another three years at least, the downside is that they can make us overlook just what a mess this is.

We are now at the point where we cannot trust the government not to lie to us. Up until now, plenty were prepared to give the government and its various sidekicks the benefit of the doubt. They were elected with a 36,000 majority, and you know how it is: 36,000 people can't be wrong. So if they can't be wrong, then they must be right, and this government must be right too - except now that its hymen has been split by two shots from a driver's gun, and the entire cabal has rushed to perform one of those cover-up surgical interventions that the Education Minister can get for $30 somewhere in America, people are suddenly not so sure anymore.

Since those shots were fired almost three weeks ago, few people have spoken of anything else. Everywhere I go, I seem to hear snatches of conversation featuring the words 'Manuel' and 'Mallia' or 'driver'. People make puns about guns, and then cringe at themselves. Each new instalment of this sorry tale is devoured on the internet. People are - of their own volition - chasing down details, putting two and two together, sometimes making five, at other times 10, and sometimes, as we have found, making four. Without eyewitnesses and journalists and the people who send in what they think might be random bits of information which are then pieced together, the government would have got away with it. I think people like Toni Abela, the deputy Labour leader who sits in cabinet, did actually think that covering up a shoot-out involving a Minister of State's driver, when you are in government, is as much of a breeze and of roughly the same significance as covering up the fact that somebody in the Labour Party club kitchen in Hal Safi was dealing cocaine. So what do you do? You chuck the cocaine in the bin (ho hum) because it is simpler than finding a 'pulizija Laburist' to help you out.

Not that a pulizija Laburist will necessarily help you when the press and the public are on your case and you are neither John Dalli nor George Farrugia's oil scandal brothers, in which case you are safe and untouchable. In this case, the pulizija Laburisti who got involved to keep things covered have ended up held on remand while another is in trouble which varies, according to different reports, between suspension from the force, forced leave and police bail. That Inspector Gabriel Micallef is head of the Drug Squad only serves to make the matter more worrying still. It took those two shots on a Wednesday night, and the follow-up chaos, to reveal to the public and the press that the Drug Squad head is the sort of person who (allegedly) thinks nothing of removing evidence from the scene of a crime to protect the man who is dating his sister - though of course he may have links to him that go beyond his sister, and that would be how his sister and the driver met in the first place. I don't think, somehow, that they met at the Black Bull Pub or similar.

Good and honest police officers must, at this point, be absolutely furious and upset at the trashing the police corps has had over the last couple of years, culminating in the events of the last couple of weeks. Of course, many of them will be glad in a way that all this is coming out into the open. How many of them will have been seething in frustration at the goings-on of Paul Sheehan, Gabriel Micallef, Frans Micallef and the rest of the circus without being able to say anything lest they end up in a fix - and also because there isn't a proper forum to which they can report instances they observe or well-founded suspicions they might have about corruption and wrong-doing among their colleagues. Trust in the police force has taken a real beating. Should the Times of Malta wish to revive its online polls - which have been subject recently to some kind of strange hacking - a good question would be: Has your trust in the police been negatively affected by recent events?