We need to go beyond the immediate headings and the political spin and go much further into the Evarist Bartolo case.

Now Mr Bartolo has all the faults and defects he has but we must go beyond the categorisation and the name-calling. The man who is now accusing him, Philip Rizzo, had, in his time criticized and accused Minister Louis Galea.

Again, Mr Rizzo is what he is but in this he is certainly being coherent. He has attacked corruption back then and also now. He has attacked a PN minister as he is now attacking an LP minister.

Let us take this from another side: on the one side there is the huge government machine, and on the other hand there are those who are not part of this machine and the two sides never seem to meet.

We have had many instances before: people from the private sector who enter the government service rarely succeed, never get integrated into the system.

It does not mean that just because Mr Rizzo is the only outspoken voice in the government machine that all the rest are acquiescing or tainted by corruption. On the contrary, we firmly believe that there are many upright persons in the government service.

Mr Bartolo has his faults in this case, but one suspects his fault was that he delayed taking prompt and drastic steps once he knew where his duty lay. Mr Rizzo goes further: he says that the minister, with his delaying tactics, allowed corruption to fester.

It is clear that when the investigations focused on the person who was is the brother of the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, that was very dangerous ground and the minister was called to take some pretty drastic steps.

Now Mr Bartolo can huff and puff all he wants, as he did in his speech in Parliament in which he accused the Opposition of being hypocrites, but he himself is not denying the bare bones of the charges, which are pretty precise at that. All the email exchange he has revealed gives us an idea of the to-ing and fro-ing between minister and CEO but, so far as one could see, there was never a ministerial decision, never a ministerial directive to stop the rot.

Prime Minister Muscat has now said he well understands Mr Bartolo’s situation. So do we if we remember similar cases of ministerial indecision in other governments when what was clear to everyone was not clear to the minister involved.

But this, we must understand, will not do. Ministers are not expected to jump to conclusions, but they are expected to take decisive action, and that does not mean exchange more emails.

The alternative to taking action is precisely what we are seeing: claims of corruption and of collaboration in corruption which the minister involved finds difficult to disprove.