So now we have it. The question whether to lock down or not to lock down has become a policy distinction between the two-party political leaders. This is hardly what we need in a time of crisis, is it?

I don’t blame the opposition leader for this. His team has repeatedly asked the government to be allowed to participate in the committee steering us through these waters. The extent of the support they can provide in terms of adding to the insight provided by the experts may be limited. But if working around the same table has the effect of giving us mere mortals a unified, coherent and clear message, then surely the government could have made the effort to let the lads from across the aisle into the big boys’ room. Just this once.

But the government won’t have that if instead it intends to use the worst health crisis in the history of independent Malta in order to spout cheap propaganda.

Edward Scicluna thought this was the right occasion to praise his own economic policies of the last seven years almost as if giving himself the gift of foresight and that he was expecting coronavirus to happen in order to vindicate his ministry. He was admonishing us for complaining about corruption, money laundering and the selling of our citizenship because if we didn’t have corruption we’d all be dying in the streets right now.

Silvio Schembri indulged in a little Kim Il Sung worship, publicly thanking our collective fortune for the inspired leadership of Robert Abela. He gets that from what exactly? The mere fact that the prime minister is sporting a 5 o’clock shadow at an 11am press conference?

And don’t get me started about Brian Hansford unseen but heard speaking from the ranks of journalists, on his knees only not quite literally suckling the prime minister’s balls because the literal act would have jarred with all the advice about social distance.

Leadership cannot be confused with self-praise. The latter is rather a compensation for insecurities about the former. If the prime minister feels he needs to wheel out acolytes to praise him so embarrassingly on TV every day, we cannot help suspecting he needs the encouragement.

The reasons Robert Abela gave today for not ordering a lockdown are not convincing. There are properly valid reasons he could have given and he struggled to remember them from his brief. There’s some truth we are dancing around here for fear of panic. The virus could be around for more than a few days. It could be weeks or months. Draconian measures might be impressive to begin with but if people find the government has forced them into effective imprisonment for an undefined period of time without the scientific evidence backing that decision, perfectly legitimate orders coming later risk being ignored.

But the prime minister was wrong today to upgrade the avoidance of a lockdown as an objective in itself. He has diluted the priority of health and weakened it with considerations about himself having to give unpleasant news and issuing unpopular orders. If he’s thinking like this – and this comes across in his public remarks – then we can have little confidence that he will do what he must in the public interest.

If he is need of so much public admiration and praise that he gets Edward Scicluna, Silvio Schembri and Brian Hansford to sing public hymns to his glory, he is not likely to take decisions anyone would be unhappy about.

And he has painted himself into a corner by leaving the opposition out of his co-decision war room. He has allowed them to second guess his decisions and to anticipate his moves which are almost always hopelessly behind the curve in any case.

He ordered flights from Italy stopped days after doctors begged him to. He ordered schools closure only after independent schools that could decide for themselves forced his hand by acting unilaterally. He ordered social distancing after employers who could manage it sent their staff home. He ordered mandatory quarantine when all professional bodies from the health care sector clamoured for even tighter measures.

He has been chasing events in order to look like he is leading them.

And now that the opposition has done the inevitable, having been left out of the room where the people advising the prime minister are giving their warts and all recommendations, he is faced with an alternative menu of actions provided by the people he would least like to upstage him.

What’s the danger of that? The last thing fresh-faced Robert Abela wants is for the Maltese public to have an alternative to his own program of how to manage the health crisis. His insecurities will force him to act against the opposition’s advice not necessarily because it is wrong or even because he thinks it is wrong, but because the advice comes from the opposition.

Now here’s where we get poorly served. Here is when we start becoming ever more uncomfortable watching government press conferences about the hugeness of our prime minister even as it looks increasingly like he is compensating for something.

This is when we start doubting whether the instructions we are given are in the interest of our public’s health or in the interest of our ruling party’s popularity ratings. This is when we start wondering if Robert Abela can push his vanity away from his mind for long enough to take the decisions we need him to take.

I am careful here not to go into the merits of whether locking down is really what we need, or even whether we might need it later. Unlike Brian Hansford, as it seems, I do not have the technical knowledge to impose my views regarding the matter on anyone. Unlike the prime minister I do not have the benefit of expert advice.

That is why I have been extremely careful not to second-guess government instructions and as for what I did personally I strictly complied with them as I urge everyone else to do. But the same concerns and sense of civic duty that lead me to make those choices make we wonder why the government’s instructions need the adorning of cheap, iron curtain propaganda: that in order for me to be persuaded by the government to do what it asks me to, I have to be reminded about the wisdom of Joseph Muscat’s economic policies, of the divinely inspired leadership qualities of Robert Abela, of their new breed of socialism and of their monopoly on truth and wisdom.

They doth protest too much.