Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri did well to offer his resignation following the theft of cannabis from an Army depot. Perhaps it would have been better had he resigned. After all, at Labour we made much fun of Prime Minister Fenech Adami when having been censured by the courts, he resigned, confident that he would be called back and "obliged" to withdraw his resignation. But that must have been a long time ago!

A politician in charge is responsible both for what he does and for what those who in his name exercise public service roles of a decisional and managerial nature do. If they mess up, he/she is equally involved.

Certainly the obligations of responsibility cannot be applied indiscriminately. There has to be proportionality in the assumption of responsibiltiy. However there has been an - excessive? - increase since the year 2000 in instances when almost any failure has been tolerated or ignored. The impact of such an approach is not evident in the short term but it then continues to grow, leading in the end to a significant relaxation of the seriousness, discipline and accountability that the public sector needs to maintain in order to carry out its duties properly.

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IN GERMANY

The CDU/CSU election win in Germany was less than impressive. True, the important thing in elections is to win. But they targeted to get at least 30 percent of the vote and did not make it. If they're going to set up a coalition with the socialists, their majority in the German Parliament will be slim. There is hardly a suitable third party choice which could also be included.

The CSU want to have no truck with the Greens.The ex-communist Left party will certainly not be considered. And there has remained a total taboo against the extreme right AfD, though the new Chancellor Merz recently relied on them to get through the Parliament a motion on immigration.

Based on a narrow coalition between conservatives and socialists how will the new German government be able to offer a strong leadership for a Europe which seems to have been transfixed by President Trump's radical initiatives?

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THE CHURCH

Quo vadis the Maltese Church? It seems to have resigned itself to a role by which to organize the religion recognized by the state. When as a body or through its main representatives it assumes a higher profile, which is generally done in an unfocussed way to criticise some aspect of government policy, it hardly sounds convincing.

The impression is given that there is no clear awareness of issues that are of the greatest significance in our society - like drugs, the housing and renting problem, the environment, the situation of third country nationals in Malta, the gaming industry, the increase of social inequality, among others. Statements and activities that get organised about them seem to be disjointed, as if being carried out for the sake of doing so, too frequently without any proposals that lay out alternative options to what is being done.

In this, it might be that the Maltese church is experiencing the same problem as various other institutions, namely the indifference of its own members. The same few people assemble to carry on with the job, without much renewal or increase of personnel. It would be a pity if that is truly the case. Even one who believes deeply in secular values can still agree that the Church had and still has a compass for the direction society could take that should be articulated.