Joe Brincat is on one of his quixotic time-wasting expeditions again. He filed a judicial protest today asking the State’s Advocate to conduct an inquiry into the conduct of the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry.

 There’s a lot of legal gobbledegook there to make his letter sound important and credible. It’s all a pile of bull of course. The inquiry is not a judicial process even if it was conducted by judges. So trying to apply principles of court-room procedure to it is just a waste of time.

The inquiry is an administrative process, not intended to determine the guilt or innocence of anyone and therefore not requiring the sort of safeguards needed in a court that is. That includes whatever other “pronouncements” the members of the inquiry board may or may not have made elsewhere.

The silliest objection in a series of silly objections is that the inquiry’s recommendations went beyond the inquiry’s terms of reference because the terms of reference did not invite the inquiry to make recommendations.

Where does Joe Brincat get all this rubbish from?

If recommendations are not binding – and they aren’t – no one needs any specific legal instrument to make them. I could make recommendations to the government. God knows I’m doing that all the time. The government is of course free to ignore me. God knows they do that all the time.

It’s a bit harder to ignore the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry board and their recommendations because they are backed by the strength of the evidence the inquiry has heard and compiled and the inescapable logic of its reasoning.

The government is still free to ignore the inquiry’s recommendations, and as far as we can see, it fully intends to do so.

But it needs cronies like Joe Brincat to discredit the inquiry on its behalf to undermine the moral force of the inquiry and its recommendations.

Joe Brincat never minded being entirely wrong, even spectacularly wrong. He intervened in the court case I filed against the government for preventing me (and many others) from continuing our protest at the Great Siege Memorial. He complained to the court that our protest denied him the right to mourn a relative of his he knew and loved, presumably a relative he knew and loved who died in the Great Siege of 1565.

The court listened to Joe Brincat patiently. And then ignored him. Because that’s what you do with silly recommendations.

Joe Brincat’s judicial protest today is in the same vein as his intervention in my court case against the government. It’s not intended to be right. It’s not intended to be taken seriously by anyone who matters.

It’s intended to give the average Labour Party supporter something to cling to, an alternative reality they could indulge in, when the facts show them to be wrong. He is the geriatric equivalent of Edward Zammit Lewis accusing Simon Busuttil of being “a threat to the rule of law in our country”.

Tyrannical governments need jesters too. Meet Joe Brincat.