Reader, I have an earworm. Anyone who has been inflicted by one knows that it is as bad as tinnitus. A particular tune that keeps playing in my head especially at inconvenient times when I need to concentrate on work or need to sleep. 

I blame my lack of productivity and sleep on Josef Caruana, the OPM official and erstwhile editor of L-Orizzont.

Yes, the very one who wrote an editorial following the 2017 general election calling for the cleansing of journalists who didn’t buy into his government’s spin of L-Aqwa Żmien.

When he was quizzed this week at the public inquiry into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, and asked pointedly whether his social media posts were befitting of a public official, Caruana said rather disingenuously “I’m not a public officer, I’m a person of trust”.

Since then, I have been humming the song Trust in Me also known as the “Python’s Song” from the Disney film The Jungle Book. Fitting.

Reader, it gets worse. In my head, the sibilant notes are sung by Caruana as if in a disturbing reality TV singing competition, with Matthew Carbone, the OPM head of communications, cast as Shere Khan.

Fitting, since the song, although light, masks a dark narrative contrary to what the jaunty accompanying music would suggest. They might have cut a comical figure in court, but Caruana and Carbone are part of the dark narrative that has gripped our country.

Boy, did these two sing for their supper in court last Monday. It was a double act of deny, detract and deflect.

Both stretched their testimony to the limit of perjury especially when Carbone denied that journalists, proper ones, not propagandists that masquerade as journalists, were locked in a room by government heavies.

Being a person of trust does not exonerate you from shouldering responsibility

Without a hint of irony, Carbone said, somewhat importantly, that on that night he deployed a media management procedure to ensure that the then disgraced Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was “safe in his office”.

Safe from whom? Carbone said that he was protecting him from the protestors outside but it was journalists inside Castille who were being held hostage on that dark night. True to form, his sidekick in this song-and-dance routine, Caruana underlined Labour governments’ disdain for journalists when he justified his hit parade of journalists who deserved to be cleansed and expelled from the country because “those journalists used to cause harm”.

The first journalist on this list was Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Caruana was unrepentant about his membership in secret hate groups and his social media posts because he is a person of trust. Let me break it to you, Mr Caruana. Being a person of trust does not exonerate you from shouldering responsibility for any misdeeds or from being made to shoulder responsibility for them.

You are still bound by the code of ethics of the Public Act (Schedule 1 of Cap 595) which applies to all public sector employees. In a normal country, you could be investigated by the Commissioner of the Public Administration Act.

But you must be feeling immune since your understanding of the standards of public life dovetails with the normality much touted by your new boss, Prime Minister Robert Abela.

After all he did declare that he would tackle Malta’s hate speech scourge without admitting his party’s role in its rise.

Someone needs to show him the dossier of screenshots presented to the board of the public inquiry by Corinne Vella, Caruana Galizia’s sister, at the inquiry.

The retention of tainted persons of trust from the Muscat administration, even more so now after the disgraceful spectacle in court last Monday, says more about Abela’s questionable choices in which persons to trust than about apparatchiks like Caruana and Carbone.

At last Sunday’s extraordinary general council of the Labour Party, the prime minister said that “everyone should be at liberty to be who they want to be”.

Apparently being immune from investigations and prosecutions is one of them.

You only have to look at who is by the prime minister’s side as his security detail: one Ronnie Vella, one of the heavies who locked the journalists in Castille.

Is Vella protecting Prime Minister Abela from journalists too?

That should cover the bare necessities. There goes ano-ther earworm.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is a member of the Repubblika executive committee.