Insofar as Labour used any means available to hoover up all the votes that were up for grabs, you can't really blame them, especially when it was a manifestly successful ploy.

Perhaps one would have preferred the choice to have been made on more fundamental levels (it's the economy, stupid) but there you are, politics in the early 21st Century is not about that, it seems.

And before any wag weighs in with silly remarks about how bad the PN was in Government because the party's finances are in shambles, could you bear in mind that in this country, there is a difference between the party in Government and the Government?

The people running the former are not the people running the latter and said latter are supposed to ensure that their party does not leech off the public purse. The fact that many Labour Lil'Elves seems unable to discern the difference is worrying, to a degree.

Just as worrying, perhaps more significantly, is this perception that the award of ministerial positions by the PM is made on the basis of how deserving a family-unit is of receiving favour - witness the apparent choice given to the Farrugia Tandem as to who is going to run the health portfolio.

Meritocracy, I hear you say?

But now that the election has been won and dusted, could we please not have any more silly playing to the gallery? I know, the fog of war enveloped the Piano Project in such a cloud that everyone and his less gifted brother kept on calling the open-air performance space element "the roofless theatre" even when it became clear that this epithet was merely a slipshod throwaway line dreamt up by the likes of Zammit Tabona, in his gagging zeal to be down on everything that did not meet his gracious approval, but this is no excuse to perpetrate mindless barbarism and vulgarity now that the prize has been reached.

The space that the Vulgarians want to roof over is not and was never meant to be a theatre. It occupies a space that used to have a theatre built on it, but now it is designed as an open space, to be used for appropriate events, not as a substitute for what used to be there.

It is virtually impossible, as Zammit Tabona and his like well know, to fill the spaces, covered as they are, that are available for performances as it is. This is not to say that there shouldn't, resources permitting, be some thought given to a modern facility being constructed, though said thought has to involve proper reasoning, not the "I want it that way because I say so, so there" frame of mind that was adopted heretofore.

So let's have less of this messing around with Piano's work, shall we?

Most people who have some degree of culture in their soul, when it isn't muffled by blind ambition and perverse obdurateness, know that having a Piano designed building is something most cities would kill for. We, on the other hand, because it suits our transient convenience, have the sheer nerve to tinker with one.