Even as the lies melt away, one illusion continues to be peddled: We need to wait for the ‘full facts’ to emerge concerning the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia before the necessary radical political decisions are taken.

It's natural to be breathless as events and revelations race past each other. I began writing this column while Keith Schembri was still the Prime Minister's chief of staff. Midway it was announced he’d resigned. I have no idea who else will have resigned, who arraigned, what other inquiry or investigation announced, by the time you read this.

In a way, however, they are all beside the point, this carousel of ministerial staff questioned by the police and marathon meetings soaking up the waking hours of Joseph Muscat.

Tempting though it is, we should avoid speculating about the provisional results of the criminal investigation. Unless this was the most crowded assassination plot since Julius Caesar, it is unlikely that all the people called in for questioning were in on it. There have been enough people summoned for two or three assassinations. So we should expect false leads and further twists. We should resist trying to second-guess the police. 

Judging political responsibility, however, is a different matter. That belongs to the public sphere. It concerns the safeguarding of the country’s reputation and institutions. It is unconnected to criminal guilt. It has to do with whether our public servants have done their duty and whether they are now in a position to perform it. 

For this, all the necessary facts are in. They have been in for a long time. Any new facts are surplus to requirements. 

We did not need Keith Schembri’s name to emerge in the context of the interrogations of Yorgen Fenech and Melvin Theuma. He should have resigned or been fired the moment the news of his Panama company emerged. Around the world, even in Mongolia, that was a resigning matter.

He reacted with untruths that were exposed by international financial journalists. When evidence emerged of plans to receive €5,000 a day from a secret company owned by Fenech, he said they were ‘draft plans’. But on that admission alone he should have been fired – it’s a corrupt plan. 

Then there's Konrad Mizzi, the minister disgraced by the discovery of his Panama company and disgraceful in how he owns up only to ‘misjudgement’. Waist-deep in muck, as I write he still is minister and still speaks as though he occupies the moral high ground. 

He says he doesn’t have to resign as he has nothing to do with the assassination. He’d be under arrest if we knew he did. The issue wouldn’t be resignation but jail time. 

Mizzi says he walks tall but his tall tales are taller. He wants us to believe that he was multiple times a victim of malpractice by his financial adviser – who among other gross ‘mistakes’ stated in writing that Mizzi, too, was to receive €5,000 a day from Fenech’s secret company, 17 Black. Did he sack his adviser? 

Mizzi’s story was given cover by the Prime Minister. No essential ministerial responsibilities were taken away from him. 

If opening a Panama company was a serious misjudgement, then it was Muscat’s misjudgement, too. For according to the offficial story, Muscat had been informed of Hearnville some two weeks before Caruana Galizia broke the story. Then, Muscat fully supported Mizzi’s bid to become Labour deputy leader.

Mizzi likes to say that at the following general election he was re-elected to fParliament with a larger vote. But that doesn’t exonerate him. It simply ropes Muscat in a firmer bind to Mizzi. 

For the reason why there were so many votes to be won on Mizzi’s fourth electoral district is because Muscat did not recontest that district in 2017. The thousands of votes he won in 2013 were up for grabs. Mizzi only scooped them up because he clearly had Muscat’s blessing. 

So, this brings us to the nub of the issue now. In certain circles, Muscat liked to say that he wouldn’t fire Schembri and Mizzi because they were essential ‘doers’ in his government. He let them define his government. He shielded them even though it brought Malta’s reputation into disrepute. 

Does anyone seriously believe Joseph Muscat can survive six to nine months of this?

He took no action even as facts emerged that Schembri and Mizzi had suspicious links to Fenech. He took no action even as the National Audit Office showed, in a 600-page report, how the rules were bent and broken to accommodate Fenech and friends in the Electrogas power station deal. 

And, once Caruana Galizia was assassinated, Muscat permitted a further scandal. As Labour leader, he allowed Labour’s online army to suggest the possible complicity of Matthew Caruana Galizia in his mother’s brutal killing. 

There was no safeguarding of Malta’s reputation. The bending and breaking of rules, and the partisan targeting and scapegoating of Caruana Galizia while she was alive, created a political environment of impunity that could easily have misled a would-be assassin that he could get away with her murder unscathed. And the smears after the assassination – the partisan attacks on her family as ‘enemies of the people’ – sowed division and further instability. 

The political buck stopped with Muscat. He was the ultimate enabler of the instability in which the assassination occurred. Now, he and his apologists say he is needed to give the country stability. 

We’re asked to believe only Muscat can resolve a crisis he helped create. He led us here by committing a series of grave misjudgements. Over the past week, his behaviour has been bizarre in the estimate of a retired senior police officer and a former Chief Justice. But we are to believe that, having pulled us in so deep, he can now pull us out.

It has been said that we cannot know whether a new Labour prime minister would be up to the challenge. But the challenge is to insulate the State from further scandal and to allow the government to govern. 

No new prime minister should be managing the investigations and court cases. A new prime minister would be able to focus on the challenge of delivering Labour's electoral mandate. 

Muscat, on the other hand, would be a lame duck. Every new revelation in court would be a political question directed at him, sucking up his time, perpetuating uncertainty. 

It would keep the crisis open. Does anyone seriously believe he can survive six to nine months of this? Does any rational, committed Labourite – no matter how indebted or grateful he or she feels towards Muscat – think this can carry on for six months without damaging Muscat’s inevitable successor? I’m eager to hear people explain how.

ranierfsadni@europe.com