As revelation piles upon revelation and news report upon news report, the stories of corruption, abuse, pilfering and filching, cronies on the payroll, ‘making the most of it’ and splashing around in the trough are stacking up into a tottering pile. And people read them and listen to radio debates about them with increasing numbness that should not be mistaken for indifference.

It is the numbness of those who feel helpless in the face of the inevitable and inescapable. The human psyche is programmed to deal with the bad things about which it can do nothing by going into a state of denial. As somebody told me about her quite dire personal circumstances to which she seemed unresponsive and indifferent, while others were worried on her behalf: “There’s nothing I can do to change the situation, so the way I look at it, there’s no point in letting it ruin my life or getting upset.” And she went off to get her hair done for the party that night.

I think that’s pretty much the way people are looking at the political situation right now. Just past the government’s mid-term point – a time when there would generally be performance reviews, assessments and point-by-point ‘looks back’ in the newspapers, only this time there are none – people have moved beyond shock and scandal. Everywhere you go, you hear the same refrain: “It’s just too much. One thing after another – and the sort of things you just don’t believe could happen.”

But happen they do. Never have a home-made Maltese clock valued at €400 and the infamous ‘hames mitt ewro fil-gimgha’ seemed so very ridiculous and so very far off in time and place. The enormity of what is happening now is literally overwhelming to the point where people’s minds are shutting down. They turn to the business of living their lives and making money and register the news somewhere at the back of their mind. And that is exactly what the government is counting on.

The past few days have brought a bonanza of scandals into the public domain, many of them as a result of questions put to the government in Parliament by Opposition MP Kristy Debono. Through the information which the government was obliged to give in reply, the press – and through the press, the public – discovered a fresh load of cronies who have been put on the public payroll, not with full-time jobs but with far more lucrative and convenient consultancies. These involve doing largely nothing while receiving a very generous monthly retainer fee. Robert Musumeci, for example, is paid what civil servants on scale 4 are paid, but for faffing around as a consultant and not for a full-time civil service job. The Labour Party’s executive secretary, Lydia Abela, has collected €17,000 for advising the Gozo Minister on the projected cruise liner terminal for Gozo. Exactly what she knows about the legal ramifications of cruise liner terminals is beyond me. The government has been more generous with the deputy leader of the Labour Party – not the one who is now a largely invisible deputy prime minister, but the one who a few days ago lost a civil libel suit filed against me for describing him as an incompetent clown. Toni Abela has collected around €100,000 in consultancy fees from various government ministries since the Labour Party got into power. They include consulting on transport and oil exploration, two fields in which he is not known to have any kind of expertise whatsoever. But even if he did, it would be most inappropriate for the deputy leader of the party in government to have himself put on a retainer fee to that government. It looks really bad, but what does he care?

And here is what is really worrying: they don’t care. They actually think that they are justified in grabbing and snatching all they can while they are able to. I clearly remember thinking – I don’t know why; it was a sudden flash of insight while listening to them rant on – when they shrieked and raved against corruption and contracts and money and jobs for the boys, while they were in Opposition, that they didn’t sound like people outraged because of their principles and integrity. They sounded like people who were angry because they were jealous, because they thought that the Nationalists in government had “filled their pockets” far enough and now it was their turn to fill theirs. Thereafter, that feeling, as I listened to them kvetch and yell and cry “Scandal!” never really went away. And now as I watch them snatch and grab – a five-year supermarket trolley rush – I understand that this was exactly what it was always about.

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