While it is somehow easy to demonise a faceless blonde Russian and to dismiss the quips of an ex-police officer as politically motivated, it is indeed an incredible challenge to spin the manifestly shifty, serial wife-battering, inexplicably wealthy, multiple passport-wielding Ali Sadr as some sort of hero.

And yet the Labour trolls have their instructions.

The new narrative is that he’s in a US jail because evil old Uncle Sam is punishing him from defying oppressive and unjustified sanctions against the long suffering Iranian and Venezuelan people. He is being presented as some sort of Oskar Schindler, risking life and limb to defy the perpetrators of a war crime.

If you really want a war-time analogy, Ali Sadr is a black-market profiteer defying economic sanctions that are in and of themselves diplomatic acts of restraint.

Ali Sadr did not have two St Kitts and Nevis passports to escape some Nazi concentration camp. Whatever he is, he is not a British airman in captivity in a Bavarian lager.

What Labour spin is trying to do is reverse the excruciatingly damaging association between Joseph Muscat and a person long accused in Malta of being up to no good and now accused by the United States of having been up to no good since his mid-twenties.

The mental picture of Joseph and Michelle Muscat, guests at a Venice wedding of someone now locked in a US jail should, in theory, harm Joseph and Michelle Muscat. Not if Labour trolls have anything to say about it and my God do they have something to say about it.

It is Ali Sadr that benefits from the golden touch of Joseph and Michelle Muscat’s holy presence. His crimes are absolved ipso facto; by virtue of knowing the great leader and his great wife.

In this environment of wilful, self-destructive perversion of logic, it has become impossible to communicate common sense. Even the basic notion of consistency is abandoned.

The same Police Commissioner who consciously allowed Ali Sadr to hide the evidence 11 months ago and every day since then, insists with the fury of Judge Dredd, that Maria Efimova must face justice. The same government that so vociferously enacted whistle-blower legislation deny it to Jonathan Ferris the first time it might actually prove useful to anyone.

Welcome to the deep recesses of this alternative reality, where truth is optional and right is but the will of the leader.