Here is the filth, the rot, the venom at the very heart of our nation. Here is the hate that politicians and journalists have cultivated over months and years against the only one in this country who would stand up and speak out without seeking personal advantage and reward.

This Ramon Mifsud is a recently promoted official of what should be the force of the most upstanding members of our community: the police.  He leads people in a disciplined force entrusted to protect us from crime.

Here is the thin blue line between us and criminals who want to rob us and kill us.

And here he is celebrating the death of the victim in the first successful political assassination in our history. When we are supposed to have confidence in the rule of law here is a policeman celebrating justice perpetrated by criminals: an execution as far outside the law as anything could possibly be.

Here is the unembarrassed evidence that organised crime and corruption have taken over our institutions. The fact that as I write this, this man is still a police officer, even as he shames us in front of the world, is the evidence his bosses are in on the crime we witnessed yesterday.

This is a Mafia state. And no one can recognise it better than our Italian neighbours. Read this report in La Repubblica. We thought we were immune to this. But the Mafia has policemen, journalists, politicians and judges in its pockets. In Malta.

We have become the Chicago of Europe, the new Palermo.

For criminals, drug lords and mafia bosses, truly the best of times.

And the politicians in their pockets have given them our country.

Meantime the world watches this spectacle of an arrogant, self-important, self-congratulatory tribe of wealthy people in the middle of the Mediterranean who spoke for decades from the podia of the world stage telling people why the Maltese model is best. How we have fallen.

The shame.