“If you don’t like my answer, stop asking me questions,” said the minister, said the representative of the people, said the champion of the working class.

This took place on the same day that our self-acclaimed socialist prime minister told his followers that the criticism by “bloggers and writers” of his forward-looking government was useless garbage, only fit to be ignored.

The underlying message of this administration is that the “social contract” is based solely upon the premise that, once you leave the polling booth and regardless of who is elected to run the country for the next five years, you are expected to stay home, stay quiet and to respect the will of the majority.

It’s like good governance, accountability and responsibility for public finances are merely optional obligations. It’s like members of the cabinet, in virtue of their party’s success in the polls, are entitled to behave like gods in their own right and not as agents in the name of and for the public good.

They justify their allegedly corrupt deals by accusing the other party of having been corrupt too. The false narrative is that, before 2013, Malta was a third world country, run by prime ministers who, for 25 years, did nothing for the country and who, instead, stole millions from the people, the poor and the homeless.

The official propaganda works because the majority of the electorate today was either too young, or not even born yet, to have experienced the reality of a country, not free of corruption but whose leaders, unlike Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela, took steps to combat it.

What the young voter today does not know is that no prime minister before 2013 ever made millions from part-time government consultancies prior to becoming prime minister.

From independence on, none were personally involved in property deals with alleged criminals, alleged drug dealers and kidnappers, using conflicts of interest to make it happen. None had intimate relationships with alleged murderers and known money launderers.

They never reached a point where they gave us a new scandal involving abuse of power nearly each and every day.

Never before has the politician dealt with journalists with such unashamed contempt and evasive dismissal- Eddie Aquilina

Never before has the politician dealt with journalists with such unashamed contempt and evasive dismissal.

Never before have members of the cabinet been involved in so many alleged cover-ups, closing ranks, finding excuses for each other’s dishonesty and alleged secret commissions and kickbacks.

Never before have we seen police top brass taking orders from Castille on who to arrest and who not to arrest.

Never before did we see a tax commissioner go abroad on a holiday with an alleged money launderer, or a police inspector and his main murder suspect flying free to overseas football matches.

Never before did we have 77,000 foreign workers imported into the economy under an ultra-capitalist system which is both exploitative and immoral.

Never before did we see a prime minister using legal language to fob off a grieving mother who lost her son in a building collapse tragedy that points to persons close to Castille – a mother who only wants to know why it happened.

Arrogance is the mark of the man who knows that people are slowly realising that he has no substanceor consistency.

Take the abortion debate. He insults pro-lifers, calling them “conservative forces” – until his internal public paid pollsters advise him that his abortion bill is eating into his own support base. So, it’s quietly shelved for another day.

Populism is transient. Integrity is not.