That was one sinister, dark and ominous set of comments that the prime minister gave journalists this week. He went all Jean-Paul Marat, who believed that “five or six hundred heads cut off” would solve his country’s problems. In the same vein, the prime minister stated that there are “a handful” of “evil people we should get rid of”.

He was talking about people “who claim they’re journalists” but, in the prime minister’s judgement, “aren’t really”. “Who,” reporters asked him, somewhat nervously, wondering if any of them would be outed as non-journalists notwithstanding what their employment contract says.

But the prime minister wouldn’t be dragged into proper nouns.

“Them,” is all he said. “Something needs to be done about them.” The thing is, Robert Abela is prime minister. He blinks and laws are made. He yawns and the police come to your door.

If anyone can do “something”, it’s him.

When Neville Gafà and Ramona Attard join Magistrate Joe Mifsud to express regret that they can no longer sic the police on their party’s critics, we can take comfort in the fact that there will always be extremists but when the prime minister says “something must be done” and remains disturbingly vague, then you need to worry.

Things got darker. The prime minister made oblique references to Karl Gouder’s untimely death and conversations he had at the PN’s headquarters when he visited to sign the book of condolences. Abela said he was too much of a gentleman to reveal what was said during those conversations. Though he wasn’t enough of a gentleman to resist revealing they happened.

I’m about to use the word “suicide”, which is unusual in the Maltese press.

There has been no definitive ruling on the cause of Gouder’s death but the generally held understanding of the event is that this was a suicide.

He and I go back a very long way, so I feel grief for his loss and fear for his despair. I refuse to allow my memory of his life to be defined by what we understand was the manner of its ending. 

For the same reason that I reject any other injustice, I refuse to let Abela exploit Gouder’s death as an opportunity to get away with abusing his power. Abela was quick to insist he knew no more of the causes of Gouder’s death than anyone else who read about the story in the newspapers. If that is true, the prime minister has no reason to believe that tighter laws restricting free speech would have led Gouder to make a different decision that fateful morning.

Parenthesis. If the word ‘suicide’ and explicit references to it shock you when you read about them in Maltese media, I think that is part of the problem. For some reason that no one I asked could convincingly explain to me, Maltese journalism speaks about suicide with pregnant euphemism. “So and so was found dead.” “The case is not being treated as suspicious.”

It feels to me that this conscious ambiguity is burdened by primitive notions of collective shame in the way we used to say that someone is in the family way because it was awkward to use words that suggested one knew how someone could get pregnant.

The grotesque vagueness in the way we speak about suicide, particularly in the case of a public figure, fertilises the ground for speculation, an added unnecessary cruelty to grieving relatives. I will only partially close these brackets.

Consider Abela’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink remarks to the press this week. He said little, claiming he could not speak too clearly for it would be rude. He exploited the horror of Gouder’s death and the misguided polite restraint of the way we write about it in news reports to unleash a very dark threat without needing to justify it.

The purpose of all this is to muzzle free speech, for free speech is the enemy of bad government. Abela and his coterie want to bring back criminal libel. Except for procedure, criminal libel is no different from civil libel. It describes the offence of using falsehood to harm someone’s reputation, particularly a private individual’s.

Free speech is the enemy of bad government- Manuel Delia

Anyone who feels offended in this way can ask the court to rule and order the offender to pay compensation. That’s our law as it stands. Unfortunately, it is open to abuse as often bullies who can afford it start lawsuits against their critics merely to annoy them and exhaust them and outlast them. When the final decision on the case is taken, the respondent – typically a journalist or a critic – has been discredited and discouraged from writing again. We should fix that to make it harder for bullies to use the courts to intimidate journalists. When Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed, that became a bit of a cause but, so far, we’ve had little to no success.

With criminal libel, the offended party can take the easier route of filing a police complaint. The Maltese state will then do the dirty work for them. They’ll be the bullies on the bullies’ behalf. They have uniformed and armed police officers who can come to your house in the middle of the night and take away your phone and your computer “for evidence”. They can arrest you, interrogate you and haul you to court in handcuffs, all for exactly the same offence that an ordinary garden-variety lawsuit could suitably address.

Let’s be clear. You may say some things that would deserve the attention of the police and the criminal courts. If you incite violence against someone, identify a group, mobilise hatred against its members and encourage someone to end their life, you will face prosecution under the law: all these are crimes already. The police have the power and the duty to prosecute these cases.

Criminal libel is inadequate for the situations recently cited to argue that abolishing it was a “mistake”.

Consider Magistrate Mifsud’s lament that we don’t have criminal libel when he found that a man died at the hospital’s A&E from natural causes and not out of neglect from health staff as was alleged in an anonymous Facebook post. If criminal libel was an available option, it could not be used in this case. How can you prosecute someone unknown?

So, here’s another question Abela did not answer when he threatened to “do something” to “get rid of a handful” of false journalists. Can you point at a post, a story, or an opinion that you wish could have been prosecuted as a crime under laws that do not currently exist?

I suspect the prime minister will also stay vague on that because all these are excuses to allow them to pass laws that empower them to silence their critics.

For many people, the threat alone would work. Not everyone is Caruana Galizia.