Everyone loves storytelling. Even the revered leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister loves it. In fact, he and his wondrous team keep us all on tenterhooks with his stories, never revealing the best parts. Even his, and his ministers' assets, are all kept secret.

One thing which is, however, most worrying, is that the more they keep secret the more we end up telling tales about them. Most are, more than probably, true. To us normal mortals it all seems as if they are secreting - as in depositing and concealing - assets, riches, moneys, which should not be theirs.

Obviously, like all good stories, this is something we don't know for sure. By concealing their assets, by tantalising us with a no show, our imagination runs wild. Even if they were - and this would be the funniest story ever told - pure and infinitely clean, we would start having doubts when they conceal their individual wealth.

When you desperately hide what you own, even people who love or admire you - maybe not the hard-core Labourites who are blinded beyond redemption, but the slightly wavering ones - start to doubt your word. Because people who have nothing to hide show it all; in fact, they demand scrutiny. 

Yet those in power, after a few legislatures in opposition screaming for transparency, good governance, and clean politics, seem to do everything in their power to do the opposite of what they once preached.

While they are in power they, the Labour ministers led by Robert Abela and all their hangers-on, go unchecked. Unchecked? Nah, they are checked, by people who are either indebted to them, in awe of them, or who, against all odds, belong to institutions which try to keep scrutinising as much as they can. Yet ultimately they too remain toothless. If they have any bite left, and admonish, rebuke or demand justice, they are then disregarded or dismissed as partisan.

Now, we have gone a few rungs lower than ever. On our downward slide, we always seem to reach depths we feel cannot be bettered (or worsened); the level of bad news, we feel, can't be beaten. Yet further down we always manage to go. Someone, somewhere, somehow, finds a spade and digs ever deeper.

If we go any further we might end up in the furnace of Beelzebub himself.

What can be worse than all the scandals, horrors and revelations we have witnessed lately?

Any public scrutiny of the Prime Minister's and his ministers' assets has been denied by Robert Abela. He claims that the assets' declaration is for him to scrutinise.

This seems to be a script for some outrageous comedy. It sounds like something beyond belief, a joke taken way too far, a surreal situation gone totally cuckoo.

Robert Abela is the one - or one of the most - who needs scrutinising. No one, especially in a country which has been rocked by corruption, can scrutinise himself and his own buddy buddies. This is taking us to the level of countries which have no idea of proper governance. Few, if any, can rise above the temptation to let their colleagues, and themselves in the process, off the hook.

It resembles a football match which needs a decision to be taken about a goal, and the decision taker, of whether a controversial goal is to stand or not, is the head coach of one of the teams. Everyone loves a story but here we are verging on the unbelievable made real.

Everyone needs scrutiny. By third parties, who are independent and free from obligations. If these decisions regarding scrutiny by the Prime Minister himself remain in place, then we truly can say our democracy has descended to the pits.

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