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Updated at 15:40 of 14 August 2023 An edition of the Government Gazette has issued a notice that Robert Abela is away and Chris Fearne is Acting Prime Minister. The notice is dated today but back-dated to yesterday when the prime minister was already away.   The authors of our constitution anticipated a very simple [...]

I have read many beautiful and heartfelt obituaries and appreciations of Rose Vella who became a reluctant public figure when her daughter, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed nearly six years ago. I have little to add to the admiration of those who came to know her in her great pain. “At the cross her station [...]

Except perhaps as a government agent on national TV news, Norma Saliba hasn’t been particularly successful in her last job. No one remembers a single piece of journalistic work that she can be even in part credited for. TVM News under her stewardship lost several impartiality complaints and won close to no awards for the [...]

In today’s Malta Independent Alfred Sant reluctantly acknowledges that “negative thinking” is, on balance, a good thing. He says that critics of the government who point out what they think is wrong without constructively presenting alternatives are boring and tedious. But none of that makes them useless. You need negative thinking because out of that [...]

From my article in  The Sunday Times today: "These cronies, utterly bereft of talent, who smiled inanely at the men-only late-night dinner parties with Schembri or at Muscat’s over- the-top birthday parties in Girgenti, ran the branches of government. "They had the job of planning for our electricity needs, of keeping hospitals working, to make [...]

Two years ago today, three judges published their report after hearing dozens of witnesses give their account of the circumstances in which Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. Most of the evidence they heard was given in public and extensively reported in the press. That was an extraordinary achievement in itself. In the days after Daphne [...]

The Jean Paul Sofia magisterial inquiry makes the following observation: “This in genere inquiry did not and could not have had the direct objective of examining whether administrative and or legislative failures came into play. The evidence gathered by the undersigned indicates institutional, systemic, and legislative failures. This also emerged from the report by the [...]

After a few squats in the trenches ministers have disappeared. They found themselves announcing too prematurely that the faults that caused the power cuts had been solved. They hadn’t. Power cuts are still the order of the day. The story of Mount Carmel patients left in the heat and the dark for hours would have [...]

The headlines of yesterday’s Sunday Times and Malta Today political surveys at face value appear contradictory. If you expect from polls what some expect from tarot cards you risk being misled. Polls are tools and one must learn to use them if they are to work for one. There’s much in the two studies which [...]

I wrote a few days ago that the first reason by tyrannies flounder is that there’s no one to prevent political leaders from making stupid mistakes. Leaders of democracies have an equal potential to blunder but checks and balances along the way can slow them down. Insider reports on the days leading to Robert Abela’s [...]

Napoleon died in exile in St Helena in 1821. In his will he asked to be buried in Paris but at the time of his death the British refused a French request to return his remains. In 1840 King Louis-Philippe’s popularity was waning and he thought it would be a good PR stunt to bring [...]

I’m not going to volunteer expertise in electricity generation or distribution, in urban planning, in meteorology, in climate science, and in all the trails of expert knowledge that go into understanding why some of us have run out of battery charge on their phone and have lost the ability to read this, never mind the [...]

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I’m just back from the vigil held in front of Castille calling for a public inquiry into the circumstances of the killing of Jean Paul Sofia. Everyone there knew on their way that the official mission of the vigil had already been accomplished. It looked throughout the day that Robert Abela was going to have [...]

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