English history records that, in 1170, King Henry II, frustrated by opposition from Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, asked his court: “Will none of these lazy insignificant persons, whom I maintain, deliver me from this troublesome priest?”

The king, doing penance after the event, would claim that it had been a question, not an order. Nevertheless, it had prompted four knights to ride off to Canterbury and kill the archbishop.

In 1998, when the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie published his book, Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa – his assassination – on Radio Tehran. Iran’s ambassador in London, summoned to the Foreign Office in protest, said the fatwa was “an opinion, not an order”.

Nevertheless, attempts were made to kill Rushdie and some bookshops promoting the publication were firebombed. He lived under British police protection until emigrating to the US.

Which brings me to the inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

I have never met Joseph Muscat – I have only ever seen him at a distance, with such heavy protection that you might think a fatwa had been declared against him – but I would not believe for a minute that he had ordered Daphne’s killing.

At the same time, I would not doubt that he would, more than once, have expressed a similar wish to King Henry’s: “Will none of these idiots I maintain deliver me from this troublesome journalist’s exposures?”

And, surrounded as he was by lazy insignificant people, who he kept in employment – men of little intelligence, without conscience or a sense of shame – how likely is it that one or more of them thought they were being ordered to shut up Daphne permanently?

I would not believe for a minute that Joseph Muscat ordered Daphne’s killing

They, most of them, had also been personally exposed in Daphne’s spotlight.  

I knew Daphne and we were friends – at one time I edited her copy (a simple job, she wrote so well). She had the two great advantages of an investigative journalist – the ability to write quickly and fluently and a team of reliable sources and contacts.

She also had a natural dislike for Labour politicians, perhaps reflecting Labour’s history with independent journalists going back to the days of ‘Desperate Dom’ (as Mintoff was known in Fleet Street).

It wasn’t as if Labour was difficult to expose: cabinet corruption was not even covert – it was all in plain sight, if you knew where to look.

The report of the ‘inquiry’ into her murder – at 437 pages, a fairly hefty tome – was two years in the writing and four years after the event. But it seems to tell us nothing that we didn’t know.

Indeed, a cut-and-paste job of reports in this newspaper would have told us even more.

Every day, it seemed, another example of corruption or of illegal collusion was uncovered. Young journalists, I noticed, had picked up Daphne’s baton and were eager to prove that their job was to hold government to account and – like Daphne, even when threatened with writs – were determined to prove that they couldn’t be silenced. (After all, in the absence of a viable opposition party, somebody has to do it.)

There was so much of it that it soon lacked the element of surprise. Interesting? Certainly. Shocking? Sometimes. Surprising? No, merely expected.

The inquiry found that “the Maltese state” bore responsibility for the assassination. At the time of the assassination, the state was embodied in one person, Muscat. Those around him were mere puppets.

“L’état, c’est moi,” Louis XIV, France’s Sun King, said and nobody since Mintoff could have fitted the description better than our ex-prime minister. For the state was him and nobody else.

And responsibility for the assassination, the inquiry found, stopped at his door. Or, rather, behind it. The buck, indeed, stops there and nowhere else.

The big bucks, meanwhile – as Daphne revealed – were going to a bank in Panama.

The big question is: does anybody care?

And the sad answer is that most people don’t give a toss. Labour people are already boasting that “at least, we expose our corruption – the PN has never done that”.