Last week, Sir Winston Churchill’s false teeth were sold at Bonham’s for the princely sum of £16,000. Sheer and utter insanity. I was struck by the notion that had Sir Winston himself been given an honorarium of the same amount during his tenure of office he would have probably bought out his cousin the Duke of Marlborough with it. Such is the ephemeral value of money in a world that every day becomes more uncertain and which tends to teeter ever closer and closer to an abyss.

I read somewhere, I cannot remember for the life of me where, that the cybergurus are predicting a major breakdown in the cyberworld the effect of which would be to lose practically everything we have created in the last couple of decades. I feel in my bones we have gone too fast too soon and that such a catastrophe is in the natural course of things. I was at a book club meeting only recently and I looked round and there were three iPads, nine iPhones and a laptop within easy reach… This manic insistence of wanting to know everything and anything just by snapping one’s fingers is verging on the neurotic and, yet, I find myself doing it too.

Today, one can hide nothing and bury nothing; even the musty bones of some long defunct Hospitaller knights turned up neatly stacked in a couple of boxes marked pasticceria assortita (assorted pastries)! Because of these dubious rather ghoulish remains the open sore created by the unwise and insensitive decision to create a square of indeterminate functionality on the site of the opera house reopened yet again.

There will be no need for a Green Room should Renzo Piano be asked to create something on the lines of his own Sala della Musica in Parma. Our orchestra would have a proper venue to perform in at last and its feasibility was confirmed by Bernard Plattner from Mr Piano’s office in the direct transmission on BondiPlus when I asked him point blank. Mr Plattner declared that, although an auditorium for symphonic music is feasible on the site, nobody had asked for it, implying the brief was of the vaguest variety, which is highly odd as our cultural needs and requirements are pretty specific.

There seems to be a severe lack of logical common sense to so many issues that Malta is becoming tragicomic. I sincerely feel the honoraria business could have been avoided. Anyone with a modicum of common sense should have known that, despite the fact that the honoraria were decided upon in 2008, putting them into effect now, in such a dire economic climate that has forced us all to frugality lest we perish, is simply not on. The wishful thinking if not gambling attempt to pull it off had the same effect as the apocryphal declaration by Marie Antoinette about eating cake. You may think me presumptuous, however were I the Prime Minister, as soon as the issue came up on the agenda I would have called the Leader of the Opposition in to a meeting and discussed the issue, especially as it concerned him just as much. The pecuniary compromise reached by the parliamentary group after such dire Sturm und Drang would have been reached then without all this hysteria and bad press that has damaged not only the Nationalist Party itself but the entire institution of parliamentary government.

In such shreds is its reputation it seems as if Mr Piano will soon be commissioned to build a mausoleum instead.

When you assess the situation you are left with one pot-boiling question: Can one govern a country effectively with a majority of one seat? In 1998, Alfred Sant called a snap election as he could not put up with Dom Mintoff’s shenanigans any longer, antics that were aided and abetted by the PN too. Dr Sant lost and should have resigned immediately and forever, disappearing into the academic world that he, to all intents and purposes, should not have ever left. Instead, he was kept there for yet another full decade turning the whole scenario of Maltese politics totally pear-shaped!

The tables have turned. The PN backbenchers have now cottoned on to the possibility they could take a leaf out of Mr Mintoff’s book and are happily causing utter mayhem. Do they not realise they are seriously weakening the very government they form part of and are biting the hand that feeds them?

Joseph Muscat could have practically taken a back seat on the issue, which, in fact, he did till the last mass meeting and the debate in Parliament. All he said was that, under the circumstances, he would be giving up his own honorarium to charity, which is all very well and good but, at the end of the day, whether or not it is going to charity it is still us, the taxpayers, who are forking this money out.

How I wish our leaders would stop playing politics and get down to some serious administration business instead and by leaders I mean both parties. The government is acting as if it is under siege and becoming every day more reactionary. Lawrence Gonzi, on the other hand, is reminding more and more of Louis XVI. This is not good news for people like me who for many years formed part of a movement to liberate Malta from the oppression and restriction of what had almost become an anarchic dictatorship. To find that the very same party whose members shed blood at Tal-Barrani has become zipped up and intolerant to the extent that the much vaunted djalogu has become a dirty word is to say the very least, disconcerting.

kzt@onvol.net

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