Once a palm reader, always a palm reader. Give a hairdresser 10 minutes in a packed wedding hall and he will return with an hour's worth of detailed (if disdainful) observation of every woman's hair. And I keep finding that, at table, in the street or an elevator, hands steal my attention, if only a side-long glance, to suggest a hidden story or a life that might have been.

There was the professor eloquently holding forth in the dining hall. He has a "murderer's thumb".

There was the Warfalli tribesman, in fez and toga, whom I shook hands with at a Libyan desert wedding. His hands were like Beethoven's: large rectangular nail plates with no moons; long fingers curving towards the fourth; the especially long pinky set apart, crescent shaped.

And at the several meetings I saw him chair, there were Louis Galea's hands, fingers curving slightly upwards, unusual in a politician.

A palm-reading primer should tell you such fingers "indicate" an unusually open mind, quick to grasp new suggestions but possibly also a tendency to pursue ideas fitfully, rather than methodically. However, I'm not mentioning this to suggest that palm-reading has got Dr Galea half right.

My intention rather is to illustrate the difference between fantasy and imagination in politics. Political fantasy - idle play with destiny and possibilities - is what palm reading offers. Political imagination - or rather a politics that keeps a sense of the common good connected to social intelligence - is what Dr Galea, who embarks on his new career in Luxembourg tomorrow, stood for during the long span of his political life.

Palm reading is based on a deeper fantasy than just the idea that the shape and lines of a hand can tell you the past and future (other than the sort of things Sherlock Holmes could pick up using a different method).

This deeper fantasy is political because it is based on a certain idea of power: that one's talents and potential exist strictly within one's own skin and that life's problem is to find the right environment - the society with the right boundaries, rules and values - in which one's fitting destiny can uncoil.

Such an idea of power is not that far off from two common ways of conceiving politics. One is that, first, one embraces "values", like freedom, free speech or strong families, and then one sets about guaranteeing them politically. The other is that politics should be concerned with practical action that abstains from value judgments.

At one level, these two conceptions of politics contradict each other. But they draw on the same source: the idea that facts and values are separable; that politics is made up of the cooperation and conflicts of individuals that were shaped outside it. That politics is essentially a game in which strategies are developed to consolidate "cultural" positions.

Dr Galea's career as a political leader, however, is best appreciated (or resented, if you must) if power is understood in a different way. We do not so much live "in" society as much as have society inhabit us.

The present generation does not just decide what kind of life it wishes to pursue. It also shapes the world into which the next generation will be born and, therefore, also the kind of people it will have. Politics might not quite "encode" the soul but it certainly copy-edits it, like the most ruthless of house-style sticklers.

I'm not sure if this is the explicit understanding of politics that guided Dr Galea. But an intuitive understanding certainly seems to have been there.

How else to explain the consistency with which he pursued not just guaranteeing rights and generating opportunity for people unused to either but also building institutions that would restructure the very terms of conviviality on which people met?

The party clubs re-characterised as a network of "homes" (djar; now "offices" and also rather lifeless). The re-introduction of ordinary terms into everyday discourse - like sedqa and wens - that highlighted their political and social character. The social use of technology - like telecare - to reinvent the meaning of life in old age.

Much of these we now take for granted, so much part of the way we think, about others and ourselves, that we do not notice them. But for a time they sounded as outlandish and euphemistic as still does one of Dr Galea's failures - the attempt to change "prison" into a "correctional facility".

Such politics neither deludes itself that it abstains from value judgments nor congratulates itself on "applying" an independent moral vision to the organisation of society. It keeps its moral intuitions firmly connected to its social intelligence - to what its mind tells it would be just, equal and liberation in this society. Now.

Dr Galea departs from Malta today leaving us two things to consider. First, the explicit message of his farewell address as Speaker: Ways must be found to build up Parliament as a centre of renewed institutions that guarantee political participation and accountability. If his antennae suggest the current institutions no longer quite fit the actual dispensation, then perhaps we ought to pay attention.

The second message is one I read off his political career. Political imagination is not for utopians. It is for realists.

ranierfsadni@europe.com