Political sauce and efforts to impress

It is only very recently that I made the "acquaintance" of Tony Formosa through accidental discovery of the letter blogs of The Times. By way of comment on a letter of mine suggesting that, in view of the very small majority of votes, Lawrence Gonzi's appeal to work together could have been given real weight had he proposed coalition government with Labour, Mr Formosa remarked that the German situation, to which I had referred, was very different from ours. As he did not give any inform-ation on this difference, this "wise" remark turned into mere assertion.

Now (The Times, April 18) we have Mr Formosa pointing out the good "political manners" of Walter Veltroni in phoning Silvio Berlusconi to congratulate him on his election win, and lamenting that this display of political good manners did not happen in our case.

Now I seem to remember that just two years ago, Silvio Berlusconi spent two weeks discovering brogli and demanding recounts when he was narrowly defeated by Romano Prodi - no polite phone calls, no congratulations, and of course no laments from Mr Formosa. At least Alfred Sant did nothing of the sort. He just cleared out, in refreshing contrast to the crocodile tears and snow-covered crevasse promises on the other side.

And, by the way, I do not write letters to impress anyone, least of all party hacks like Mr Formosa.