Perhaps the biggest trick that the Joseph Muscat administration has managed to pull off is that of having convinced the majority of the population that there has been no corruption under his watch and that anything else to any other effect is nothing but sedition.

Or perhaps the Prime Minister’s biggest trick was to let all the revelations that have come his and his government’s way wash over him like so much water off a duck’s back, relying on his cult-like status and counting on his support growing stronger with every new and nasty piece of information that comes out.

Or was his biggest trick that of having led the majority of the people to believe that the country’s economic success is actually trickling down to the huddled masses, or at least in leading them to believe that it will, one day, trickle down their way – dangling the country’s passport-sales boosted economic surplus like a carrot before a donkey?

Or was his biggest trick that of convincing the majority of the population that we really had to have a new power station, or new people to manage our hospitals – two deals that stank to high heaven and through which persons literally unknown scampered off with millions of euros that were effectively ‘earned’ off the back of the Maltese taxpayer?

Or was his biggest trick that of simply letting the accusations fly fast and furious – in fact, the faster and the more furious, the better – to put all the revelations from the Panama Papers and from so many other quarters down to cases of plausible denial and allow the country to be led into the kind of indifference that can only be explained by scandal fatigue – a syndrome most of the country has suffered an acute case of over recent years?

Or was his biggest trick in the ongoing state capture of every institution that is meant to protect the state and its citizens’ interests from the likes of the Prime Minister’s henchmen? And perhaps that is exactly why the government continues to capture each and every state institution like so many squares on a Monopoly board. Despite the critical mass of criticism it is facing at home and abroad, the government has continued to capture every institution meant to protect citizens’ rights and uphold the laws of the land without the intervention of government institutions.

It has already captured the police force, the Malta Financial Services Authority and the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit – those institutions that should have, but never did, investigate the revelations placed on their tables that exposed the misdeeds of those closest to the Prime Minister.

Now it seems that it has captured Parliament itself, with the Speaker of the House seeming to rule out parliamentary questions deemed too uncomfortable for the government to answer, such as verifying how many bank accounts the Prime Minister’s chief of staff has in Dubai or at Pilatus Bank.

And making matters even more concerning is the fact that there will soon be a number of positions within the judiciary up for grabs, and which will be appointed by the government.

Or was his biggest trick simply that of burying his head in the sand, battening down the hatches and waiting out each passing storm every time a new scandal emerges to broadside his team?

Or was the Prime Minister’s biggest trick that of convincing his people that the press is the people’s enemy, conveniently forgetting that he is now the establishment and we, the press, are the people?

Whatever the case, the Prime Minister seems to have a bag of tricks with a bottomless pit. Perhaps we still don’t know what his greatest trick has been and, who knows, maybe Joseph Muscat’s biggest and best trick is still to come.