Pizzled princes have enjoyed smutty gossip with flaming fortune-hunters for as long as royal courtiers have been around. It remains a personal matter unless private unruliness is perverting public rule.

It’s not the DIY porn that matters. It’s the light it sheds on the pornocracy, the subordination of the public interest to corrupting private interests.

The public interest of the Cutajar-Fenech chats is undeniable. Nonetheless, there’s been a tendency to be so fascinated by the details that the big picture risks remaining out of focus.

That suits the Labour machine just fine. It would have preferred its initial line – that there’s nothing new to see here – to stick. But it’s happy to have the rest of us believe that there are, as Robert Abela put it, just a few new facts.

Actually, the chats change everything we knew before.

Cutajar has always denied the accusations against her. She cast aspersions on the integrity of George Hyzler, the then public standards commissioner. These chats prove her falsity then and now. The issue is no longer “merely” about her behaviour at the Council of Europe or her relation with the taxman.

She’s still at it, denying she needed to declare her third public-funded job in her parliamentary declaration. That’s a misdeed in 2023, not 2019.

The Cutajar affair has never been just about her. It’s also been about Labour’s standards. Labour can’t force her to resign as MP. But it can kick her out of the parliamentary group, if not the party.

Abela continues to fudge and practise strategic ambiguity. He told us she had already paid the price in 2021. Actually, back then it was never stated if she resigned or was sacked. Even this week, he told Times of Malta that “it was decided that she would resign”.

Who decided? He doesn’t say because he wants it both ways. He wants credit for getting her to leave but not pay the price for sacking her: the inevitable anger from her supporters about why she is paying the price for doing something that everyone else is up to; the revelations on others which might come out in retaliation.

Now, after public outrage, he says that he expects her to do the right thing, although he doesn’t have the guts to lay down a rule he knows everyone else is violating.

Strategic ambiguity, once more. If she resigns, she can claim credit instead of admit disgrace. Meanwhile, he can avoid any explicit admission about the rot he harbours.

Abela says the chats are about 2019, before his time. No, they’re about 2023. The chats are not just about Cutajar but about the institutions that continue to protect her today.

Apart from the Labour machine, there’s the police. When Mark Camilleri warned Cutajar that he would reveal what he knew about her, she painted that as a “threat” to intimidate a public figure. She had the police prosecute him (a case that’s different from the libel case she also instituted).

The police took on the prosecution, even though the force knows what Camilleri was referring to because the chats are in its possession. This prosecution doesn’t just tell us something about Cutajar. It tells us about the police in Abela’s time – still being deployed by politicians against bloggers.

Alongside the omnivores and sanguivores, gorging themselves on public property, energy supplies and hospitals, there were the minor scavengers and detritivores- Ranier Fsadni

There’s been a lot of commentary about what Cutajar said in the chats. But little has been said about what she takes for granted and lets go without saying. The most damning part of the chats is the silent, tacit agreement with Fenech about the Labour government’s modus operandi.

What she says about “everyone pigging out” is significant because she doesn’t feel she needs to explain it. She takes it as obvious that Fenech will know what she means.

Likewise, he doesn’t get an explanation about the extra consultancy with the Institute of Tourism Studies – that is, her interest in the work itself or even what it entails. It’s implied, nonchalantly, that the job is a fiction.

This goes beyond a personal admission. It is a statement about a collective modus operandi.

Anyone sober knew this already. But some statements are significant because of who says them. Here we have a Labour insider reveal what is common knowledge among other insiders about how things get done routinely.

Cutajar nonchalantly asked Fenech if he was taking Johann Buttigieg, the then head of the Planning Authority, on holiday. Just as casually, he tells her about a boating trip and the servile adulation – which he mocks as a “photo shoot” – by the then CEO of the financial services authority.

If Cutajar could take such things for granted, which of the ministers in Abela’s current cabinet didn’t know about this? Which of them aren’t part of it?

What did Abela himself already know about Buttigieg when, as prime minister, he defended Buttigieg for expressing (in other WhatsApp chats with Fenech) a willingness to go into business with the tycoon?

These aren’t questions about 2019. They’re about 2023 and who governs us now. Abela should tell us if he agrees with Cutajar that everyone was pigging out in 2019. Someone should insist on an answer.

He will deny it – but then he’ll know we know he lied brazenly to our faces.

What Cutajar takes for granted shows how the great scams of the Joseph Muscat years could take place. The wolves, jackals, coyotes, hyenas and wart-hogs could pig out because around them was a plague of locusts, dung-beetles, leeches, tapeworms and termites helping themselves to a little bit.

While the big beasts gnawed and devoured, the little ones nibbled. Alongside the omnivores and sanguivores, gorging themselves on public property, energy supplies and hospitals, there were the minor scavengers and detritivores.

The Cutajar scandal isn’t a distraction from the Vitals heist if you realise they are of a piece. Each explains the other.