It was not clear precisely why the Education Minister, Justyne Caruana, called for the resignation of Mark Camilleri as executive chairman of the National Book Council.

To lay out the facts, the call followed a public exchange on social media that Camilleri had with a lawyer of Yorgen Fenech, who stands charged with complicity in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The day before, Camilleri had tweeted that the public inquiry into state responsibility over the assassination ought to carry on if the government has nothing to hide. According to Camilleri’s account, the lawyer messaged him to “supposedly teach me” why the inquiry should be shut down. Camilleri did not take kindly to the attempt and told the lawyer where to get off, using some colourful language in Maltese.

He then received an e-mail from the permanent secretary of the education ministry asking him to “consider” his position on the council and step down immediately of his own free will. What he published in the public domain was “certainly not exemplary to the public and educational sector,” the permanent secretary wrote.

Camilleri pushed back, saying he would leave it up to the National Writers’ Congress to decide if he should go.

Yesterday morning, Camilleri apologised for his “foul language” and said the call for his resignation had been withdrawn after he had a conversation with the education minister. He also tweeted, however, that he still wanted to leave it up to the congress to decide if they have faith in him.

The book council is an autonomous, publicly funded entity set up to promote books and reading and to represent the interests of authors and publishers. The board members are appointed by the prime minister and can be removed by the prime minister if deemed no longer fit to occupy the office or for misconduct.

Camilleri, who was behind the reform which loosened censorship laws, has a reputation for outspokenness and has been fiercely critical of the government in its handling of justice and rule-of-law issues.

In this case, his expletives were entirely out of place. The call for him to step down, though, is hardly credible in a country which has traditionally set a very high threshold for misbehaviour by a public official before a removal or resignation is triggered. The fact that the government did not fire him outright shows it felt it did not have a case based solely on his foul language.

The other, hidden, reason that has been mooted is his defence of the public inquiry as it carries on with its truth-seeking work beyond its deadline and in defiance of Prime Minister Robert Abela’s wishes.

The minister’s request, immaterial of it having been withdrawn, appeared clumsy and inappropriate

Whatever the real reason, the minister’s request, immaterial of it having been withdrawn, appeared clumsy and inappropriate. Above all, it reeked of double standards.  This is a government which has defended its own against calls for resignation following vastly worse infringements of public trust.

At the top of that list lie Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, who were adamantly kept on by Joseph Muscat long after their offshore interests had been exposed. Muscat himself delayed his resignation unacceptably following the connections that emerged between his right-hand man Schembri and murder suspect Fenech.

And those three are just for starters. The government has defended, on the basis of freedom of expression, people like former GWU chief Tony Zarb (who once described women activists as prostitutes), Valletta 18 head Jason Micallef (who mocked Caruana Galizia’s last words) and Glenn Bedingfield (who as a government official wrote hateful blogs about the journalist).

The government is in no position to cast judgement on what constitutes a matter of resignation or otherwise. Its deeply ingrained culture of non-resignation has left its credibility in tatters.