Joseph Muscat, like so many other Maltese people, is extremely stingy with his own money and makes every euro work. He never bought his own home (his parents paid for it), he told an interviewer that the most expensive thing he ever bought was a handbag for his wife (begging the question as to who paid for their cars) and he won’t pay for anything if he can get it for free. Nor would anybody else, I hear you say. But that’s not the case at all. It’s only a certain kind of person who will try to freeload whatever he can; the rest of us find that kind of behaviour undignified, embarrassing and leaving us beholden to others.

But Mrs Muscat was reported in a London newspaper as having told her interlocutor, at a party, how going away with her husband means “more treatment”. By treatment, she didn’t mean beauty treatment or medical treatment. ‘Treatment’ is how certain kinds of people refer to the hospitality they receive by virtue of their position.

But neither of them seems to have any qualms at all about spending other people’s money. Stingy with their own funds, they are extravagant with public money. The prime minister makes at least one of his household assets work for his bank account by renting it out to the government and carrying on using it all the same: his family car. When he is criticised (mildly, because Malta is not really a democracy and people are unsure how to react in situations of brazen abuse like this) he said that he is actually saving the public money by not buying a new car. This is an interesting rationale, but it doesn’t work. If his aim was really to be thrifty with public funds, rather than to earn himself another €35,000 for renting out his old and badly depreciated car (around three or four times what he would get by actually selling it), then he wouldn’t charge the government at all, but just carry on using it. After all, it is his car.

Mrs Muscat has a state-paid car and chauffeur, who takes her children to school and to ballet lessons. She sits in the car with them, which means she might just as well drive them herself and save the public some money. Would she spend money on a chauffeur if she were spending her own? No, I don’t think so. She would probably prefer to spend it on sequinned evening bags instead – and she may even have got that notorious one, with her given name emblazoned on it, for free or at a discount in return for the promotion. Similarly, when the Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat are seen at public events prominently displaying the North Face logo on various items of their clothing, we have to conclude that they have freeloaded those clothes too – or else why would they be promoting them so conspicuously?

They find spending their own money really difficult, but spending other people’s is incredibly easy, more so when there seems to be an endless supply of it even after they have put all their cronies and the entire staff of Super One on the public payroll. So the news came as no surprise that the Prime Minister is throwing away more than €218,000 a year on personal consultants to help him with, among other things, his speeches, his image and his liaisons with dictators. Even if he sticks to this consultancy bill and doesn’t increase it, he will have spent €1.1 million of public money on trying to help himself stay in office by looking good and making the right contacts. That’s something he should have been equipped to do without all that expensive help.

Those are just the consultants. We haven’t yet started on the ‘trusted persons’ and we are not about to, because I have run out of word-count. The fact remains that all the Prime Minister’s talk about having a business-like approach comes to nothing when you consider his attitude to spending money. But then, face it: he’s never run a business in his life. He has never even helped run one. He interprets being ‘business-like’ as taking decisions or imitating the language and attitude of people like Sandro Chetcuti. But the most identifiable characteristic of a good business person is the ability to trim all unnecessary spending and make every cent work well. Muscat, on the other hand, is playing at ice-bucket challenges with buckets of other people’s money on a daily basis, aided and abetted by a legion of aides and ministers who are frugal with their own cash while merrily raiding the public coffers.

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