I think it’s time the press asked the government for a comprehensive report on what its Law Commissioner has been up to for the last two years. This requirement is even more pressing now, given that after the Justice Commission was disbanded, all of its members bar the chair, Giovanni Bonello, were asked to form a Law Commission, with the Law Commissioner as its president, and they accepted. The press should also go directly to the Law Commissioner himself, Franco Debono, and ask him what he has to show for the all the money expended on him by the Maltese taxpayer since the incoming prime minister saw fit to compensate him for his aiding-and-abetting efforts by giving him a car, a chauffeur and a full salary while allowing him to carry on as normal with his private law practice.

In fact, whenever we hear of the Law Commissioner in the news, it is invariably in the reports from the Courts of Justice, wearing his more usual hat of criminal defence counsel to drug dealers, thieves and smart-meter fraudsters, or in conjunction with the Public Accounts Committee hearings into oil trading, where he is legal counsel to George Farrugia, the state witness who has been given immunity from prosecution in return for testimony that will lead to the convictions of others. I have yet to see a media report in which we are told about the ongoing activities of the Law Commissioner or his Law Commission. But hang on, that’s not quite right – we had a big episode in parliament a few months ago in which the Justice Minister said that he would be calling the law on political party financing The Franco Debono Law (we’ve heard nothing of it since). And you knew, you just knew, that the Law Commissioner had been going through one of those particularly nasty patches in which he is not quite himself and lays siege to his politician of choice with hundreds of text messages in the span of a few days. Lawrence Gonzi, in a published interview, said that he had been subjected to thousands of messages from Debono in this fashion. I doubt that Owen Bonnici is spared.

I find it quite offensive the way everybody – the press, the Opposition, people in general – have taken it for granted as though entirely normal that the Law Commissioner post was a shut-him-up-and-keep-him-quiet appointment, and that therefore no real work should be expected and we shouldn’t bother asking. The very fact that this was an appointment to a role created as a favour makes it even more pressing, not less so, for the press and the Opposition to scrutinise him and what he is doing (or not) in return for his salary, car and chauffeur. This attitude of resignation in the face of sheer abuse is really quite frustrating. Nobody would be scrutinising the Law Commissioner if he were an individual appointed to the post by transparently meritocratic methods, but given that Franco Debono is always either in court, or walking up and down Republic Street, or posting various permutations of his portrait on Facebook to the admiring remarks of a small army of desperate Labour housewives, then questions most definitely need to be asked.

It is, in a way, most unfair that the press remains in hot pursuit of Willie Mangion and his fabled hunt for a garage in return for €20,000 a year, when Franco Debono, who has a more lucrative sinecure for an admittedly far less amusing purpose about which few jokes can be made, goes largely unharried.

Objecting when abusive appointments are made is not enough. It is incumbent on the press and the Opposition to pursue, with their scrutiny, the individuals so appointed.