The charade we saw played out at the Office of the Prime Minister on Thursday night was quite unprecedented.  We had a Prime Minister engage in a most pathetic game of deception and faux transparency that we have not seen in a long time.

Amid calls for him to move away from the hearing and recommending of presidential pardon requests in cases concerning his closest people, the Prime Minister convenes Cabinet and holds an hours-long discussion with its members.  The subject matter? The consideration of the presidential pardon Yorgen Fenech has requested of the Prime Minister and presumably how he is simply too close for comfort to consider such a request himself.

We of course do not know what went on during that discussion between the Prime Minister and the ministers who he appoints to or removes from Cabinet, which is his sole prerogative.

The Prime Minister leaves the room and allows them to supposedly decide for themselves on the Yorgen Fenech pardon request, and whether it should be granted or not.  And lo and behold they decide not to give the pardon to the man threatening to blow the lid off not only the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder, but also off several other scandals very close to the centre of power of the very building within which they were sitting.

That would have been the request of the man who apparently wants to spill all the rotten beans on Muscat’s best and closest associate, his disgraced and former chief of staff Keith Schembri.

Now Muscat did not take the decision to hand this momentous decision over to his obliging Cabinet colleagues in a vacuum, at least this had been no unilateral decision. Thankfully, he said that he had also consulted the Commissioner of Police and the Attorney General over this unique course of action.

But now would that be the same Commissioner of Police who ate rabbit while the owner of a bank got away from the scene of a crime with luggage stuffed with papers? Would that be the same Commissioner of Police that left damning Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit reports incriminating his chief of staff and other close colleagues gathering dust on his shelf rather than doing his sacrosanct duty of investigating and prosecuting without fear or favour?

And would that have been the very same Attorney General that appears to be at the perpetual legalistic beck and call of the Office of the Prime Minister at every twisted pass of his ministers and cronies, and who has played every trick in the book to repeatedly procrastinate on court cases in time-buying measures in favour of these very same people?

Quite apart from the fact that neither of these two individuals appear very impartial when it comes to the Prime Minister or, for that matter, the people he is seeking so desperately to protect, and as such their advice to the Prime Minister simply cannot be taken at face value.

Over and above all that, one should also bear in mind that it would be crystal clear to the Police Commissioner, the Attorney General and to each and every member of Cabinet that it would have been the Prime Minister’s desire to not grant a pardon to Fenech and have him spill the beans. Let us make no bones about that, a pardon and this man turning state’s evidence could turn out to be a veritable nightmare for Muscat.

And let us also not forget that it is the Prime Minister that hires and fires each and every person who he asked to decide on giving Yorgen Fenech a pardon or not – the Police Commissioner, the Attorney General, and every member if Cabinet.

All of their jobs depend on him, and all of the power of state is concentrated on him. Such are the provisions of the Constitution, whose authors had not foreseen their intentions being perverted by a Prime Minister decades down the road.

The whole charade needs to be recognised for what it was: a pure, unadulterated farce.