I was not in the room when the magistrate told Chris Fearne, Edward Scicluna and a bunch of other men accused of having a secondary role in the Vitals/Steward hospitals swindle that proceedings against them would continue because they had a case to answer.

I rely, therefore, as most of the country does, on the reporting of Times of Malta. That newspaper said the magistrate’s decision was received by a “stunned” courtroom.

Prosecutors were asking for just the decision the magistrate gave, so they can’t have been too surprised. Which leaves the defendants. They must have been the “stunned” ones.

The word implies they were surprised by the outcome, that they expected another, that they walked in that courtroom that morning fully expecting to wake up to find Bobby Ewing having a shower. They expected the magistrate to echo Robert Abela’s election campaign claims that the inquiry that named them was no more than a figment of the anti-Labour imagination of another magistrate.

Indeed, some of them were making plans to celebrate the outcome they expected. Just days before the ruling was read out, Abela again intervened in this prosecution, saying he was expecting to nominate Fearne to a post in the new European Commission. That’s how sure they seemed to be the case against Fearne et alia would collapse even before it started.

Meanwhile, another court threw out pleas by Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, co-defendants in the proceedings against the alleged A-class swindlers in the Vitals/Steward hospitals heist, that the temporary freezing orders against their assets pending the outcome of their prosecution amounted to a breach of their fundamental human rights.

There should be some irony in former government ministers suing the Maltese state to argue that laws they introduced or preserved in office should be struck down because they breach human rights. Were they only bothered by the alleged violation when they, as they falsely allege, became the victims of it?

Park the irony for a moment.

They brought a case to have the freezing orders against them removed because they expected to win that case. They must have seriously believed themselves to be victims of state abuse. They must have been stunned to find a court disagreed with them.

It’s stunning that they’re stunned.

It is truly amazing that the powerful men charged with these crimes are doing more than playing the act expected of any alleged criminal undergoing court proceedings of pleading not guilty and shutting the hell up. They are instead behaving with the dignity of infants, loudly pitying themselves and acting all surprised that anyone would think they could be bad.

The act is so pronounced, I’m starting to be convinced, if not of their innocence, of their ability to sell to themselves the lies they have peddled to the country.

Consider Fearne, who has been chief mourner in his extended and overdrawn political funeral urging this political corpse to re-emerge as if this was the re-enactment of the burial of Lazarus. He does not merely insist he’s innocent of the crimes he’s charged with. He speaks of his actions in the Vitals case apparently expecting applause for having heroically resisted the crime.

He speaks of himself as doubly victimised, first by the state and then by his co-accused. He’s like the mid-ranking member of a gang that has been caught on camera robbing a bank but insists he had merely forgotten to take his motorbike helmet off when he happened to walk in the bank at the time someone else was robbing it.

Consider also Scicluna, who speaks as if he feels entitled to a medal and a cash reward for having once in his seven years as finance minister asked if he really had to authorise yet another massive payment to the alleged crooks who ran away with three public hospitals and then proceeded to authorise it. No one appears more stunned than he is that anyone might think that the constitution isn’t merely joking when it assigns responsibility to the finance minister for avoiding allowing thieves access to the public’s vault.

Robert Abela has so far failed to bend court decisions to his will- Manuel Delia

Does it matter what Mizzi, Schembri, Fearne and Scicluna say about the case against them? Does it matter whether they’re acting stunned or they’re genuinely surprised? Do we ever bother to ask if anyone else standing trial for a crime agrees outright that they deserve to be tried?

Not really. Except perhaps in Scicluna’s case, because his official position protects him, rightly, from government interference so he can conduct monetary policy without politicians telling him what to do, but who seems to think that exempts him from any accountability or any requirement for basic decency.

Park that irony as well.

What matters here is that the bullshit Mizzi, Fearne and the rest seem to believe when they expect courts to throw out the cases against them and declare them victims of state abuse, was not exclusively their bullshit. They are believing Abela’s bullshit.

For it was the prime minister who, in a sweaty and angry press conference in the prime minister’s office, assured the public the Vitals inquiry was no more than a partisan vendetta against the Labour Party utterly free of evidence or reason. It was the prime minister who repeatedly testified to the good character of the people being charged with serious crimes at the expense of the government he leads. It was the prime minister who, right until the eve of the “stunning” ruling that Fearne had a case to answer, reiterated that Fearne was the ideal nominee to a European Commission job.

Even after the ruling, Abela spoke of the court’s decision not merely presuming the accused’s innocence but, rather explicitly presuming, as he’s done so far, that magistrate after magistrate, prosecutor after prosecutor, judge after judge, are ruling against his former cabinet colleagues without any basis in fact or in law.

Abela has so far failed to bend court decisions to his will, or, at least, to serve the convenient interests of his government and his party.

He has attempted to burden the courts with the irrelevant considerations of his partisan interests, trying to get magistrates and judges to rule in favour of his associates just so nobody holds them responsible for any political harm suffered by his party and his government. So far, magistrates have proven unperturbed.

Which means that, as the case against Mizzi, Fearne – and, of course, the alleged mastermind of this conspiracy, Joseph Muscat – continues, it will be the government and the Labour Party that will be weighed down by what is happening in court. Abela tried to use his government’s ship to tow Muscat’s gang out of troubled waters. Instead, Muscat’s ship is dragging the government to the bottom of the sea.

It’s stunning that Abela is stunned by the doom he has made for himself.