Many persist in believing that we went to the polls a year and some months before it was due because the government was concerned about the fall-out from the impending trial by jury.

We've now been 32 days with this trial dominating the news. On slow days there is an abundance of titbits to titillate and keep fresh the public's thirst for news of all sorts, or accidental news.

Let me try and enumerate them. Pride of place must go to the revelation that somebody entered an office at the Auberge de Castile, the prime minister of Malta's office and found a naked man.

This beats all the other prime ministers' and presidents' offices which we know of. I'm certain Sir Keir Starmer never had to face this poser. Not Emmanuel Macron, nor, perish the thought, Giorgia Meloni. I'm not certain about Trump.

But it does not mean the august halls of Malta's presidential palaces did not witness some extraordinary episodes in the past.

The Auberge de Castile itself has Grandmaster Pinto's four half-moons on his coat of arms and you can see them on the front door (I could never understand why).

Anyway, according to a critic of Pinto, who was to become the secretary of the next Grandmaster, Pinto, in his nineties, died while trying to make love to his mistress. 

In the words of a politician who sadly is no longer with us, he thought he was coming but he was going.

Probably this did not take place at the Auberge de Castile but at the Grandmaster's Palace where another titillating ritual was followed, according to Carasi, another harsh critic of the Order. 

On Carnival Day once the populace had assisted at the race up the tree set up in Palace Square, the doors were closed, only a few senior knights allowed to stay and watch and women, chosen from among the best families, disrobed and climbed up a tree set up in the Grand Council Hall and competed for rich prizes. The Grandmaster watched.

And who knows what went on at Castile when Dom Mintoff's father was cook there.

That was only one titbit, coming as a sort of a tangent out of a soporific overlong trial.  There were other tangents to consider. Such as the story, later denied, about a gun accidentally fired next to a First Lady.

All this provided a welcome break from grumbling about the weather or the power cuts or about the length of the trial. And we still have to see the main actors testify.

I pity, really pity, the members of the jury even if they get paid (a paltry sum) for their service.

In a way, however, one conclusion has already been reached by many people. 

Time and again we come up against a wall of close links between those who are on the ruling party's gravy train. They look after each other, defend each other against outsiders, close ranks time and again, break the laws when it suits them, forget to investigate when it threatens to upset the whole applecart. It's the classic example of nomenklatura just as it is practiced in Russia and Socialist countries.

It's not coterminous with the ruling party - some people are in, some aren't. In a way it's a network of friends and friends, exactly the opposite of what a Socialist government is supposed to be.

That's one conclusion that's already been reached and substantiated regardless of the final conclusion whenever and if that is eventually reached.

A note of history 

Defending a Mediterranean Island outpost of the Spanish Empire - the case of Malta (George Cassar)

The Maltese archipelago has a long history of possession and colonisation running from prehistoric times till the attainment of political independence in 1964. One such long period of domination is that of the Aragonese who captured the Maltese islands in 1283.