Let me start with a personal note: the health issues I had mentioned back a few months have been tackled as planned and, as they say, “so far so good”.

I’d like at this point to highlight our appreciation of the enormous levels of kindness we’ve come across, from friends and strangers alike and to thank everyone.

To illustrate the sort of thing I mean, I needed to extend the validity of our return trip on Virtu’ Ferries: the reservations staff answered by return e-mail, within minutes, that this would not be a problem. A small thing, you might say, but you have no idea how it feels when complete strangers extend a helping hand.

Enough of the fluffy stuff.

What is it about Labour ministers and ex-ministers? Are they stuck in some sort of time warp and imagine they’re living in an era when what they say in the past won’t come back and bite them on their nether regions? Fair enough, last time they were in government (the Sant blip left aside), information technology was the work of the devil and computers were only allowed if you had 300 permits and 20 ministerial fiats and exequaturs, but things have moved on.

You wouldn’t think so to hear people like Minister Joe Mizzi and ex-Minister Karmenu Vella talk.

Mizzi, for instance, though I suppose for the sake of formality he should be referred to as the Hon. Mr Mizzi, as he is not an ex-parliamentarian yet, so the honorific remains his privilege.

Be that as it may be, Mizzi seems to have forgotten, though he was reminded quite vociferously in a House committee on Wednesday, that he (or someone on the government side, anyway) had said back around June that the Piano Parliament would be ready and waiting to receive the honourable panoply of parliamentarians when they got back from their summer hols.

At the time, I had suspected that this was the first step in the rehabilitation of the Piano project in the public’s consciousness, part of the process of rewriting history in which Labour and its lil’elves are such enthusiastic participants.

References to roofless theatres and cheese-grater buildings are becoming as rare in the media nowadays as protected birds flying freely through our skies, evidence that it has now become expedient to see Piano’s work of brilliance for what it is, as opposed to what it was defamed as when Labour were hoovering up the votes.

It has come to pass, though, that notwithstanding Mizzi’s assurances or pious hopes or fond delusions or whatever, the building will not, after all, be ready.

At the rate they’re going, it will be the MLP that got Malta into the EU

True to form, blame was immediately shovelled in the general direction of the heinous and nasty GonziPN, who, for at least the next four years, are going to be blamed for everything and anything under the sun, from global warming to the pesky mosquito that keeps the Prime Minister awake at night.

The problem for Mizzi is two-fold, however. In the same breath, give or take, as he was directing the public’s attention to the fact that (although the opposite impression had been given) their honoroublenesses are not going to have a nice new playground and it was all GonziPN’s fault as usual, he also said that the contractors are going to be fined for the delay.

Excuse me? You said in June it was going to be ready, now you’re saying it’s not and it’s GonziPN’s fault (Was GonziPN in government last June? Nope) and anyway, you’re going to fine the contractors?

Forgive me for being dense and stupid, which my many detractors assume I am, but what’s changed since June?

More precisely, which civil servant or other functionary are you going to blame, in the usual Labour government manner?

Who misinformed you and led you, poor lamb, to misinform the public? Or did something go wrong under your watch, since June?

Make up your mind, Mr Mizzi: either in June it was moving according to plan or it was not and if it was not, why didn’t you notice back then? If it was on plan, as you said it was, then what went wrong since then? And don’t say GonziPN because you’ve been minister now for 18 months, it’s wearing thin.

And how do you expect to fine the contractors if you’ve given them a defence on a plate, garnished with watercress, by telling the world and its brother that GonziPN are to blame for the delays?

Ex-minister Vella perhaps has an excuse to forget things which happened a bit further in the past than last June, though if he’s anything like me, he probably doesn’t remember what he had for dinner yesterday (a pretty good burger at the Xara Palace, as it happens).

Vella, soon to be commissioner in a gilded cage (if ex-minister and ex-Labour consultant John Dalli is to be believed) forgot, when he assured the European Parliament that in 2003 he voted with a resounding ‘yes’ for joining the European Union, that the media would be able to dig up his public pronouncements even as far back as 2003.

Even further back than 2003, Vella was a member of Sant’s Cabinet and he had, presumably, agreed to the “freezing” (a smarmy word for withdrawal) of Malta’s application to join the EU in 1996.

Vella reinforced the public perception of utter lack of commitment to the European ideal in the run-up to 2003 when he campaigned, alongside Sant and Joseph Muscat, to keep us out of the Union.

Vella’s single, solitary, vote in favour, in the context of the many other votershe and his colleagues were instrumental in persuading to vote against, was a complete irrelevance.

His declaration days ago that he voted ‘yes’ is, to put it bluntly, an insult to the intelligence of the people he was seeking to convince of his commitment to European ideals. Equally insulting, but perhaps less surprising, coming on the heels as it did of his abstention on the Ukraine vote, was Sant’s insouciant dismissal of Vella’s declaration of his (Vella’s) betrayal of the Labour Party’s stated position by one of its big beasts.

One is at a bit of a loss as to why Sant was unperturbed: does he take betrayal, even an irrelevant and childish betrayal such as this, as a normal state of affairs in the Labour Party he had headed?

Or is he so unconcerned with the value of a vote that he attributes scant importance to it?

This single episode should have highlighted to Vella’s interlocutors that they needed to examine his fitness for office with a strong magnifying glass.

It must be assumed that Vella relied on advice from his collaborators in opting to use the ‘I campaigned no but voted yes gambit’. So fundamentally wrong is this approach, as against the “yes, I was not of the view that Malta would be well served by membership, but now, as you can see by the way its government has embraced the EU, I am as convinced that our place is in the Union” line, that you have to question whether someone who relies on such stupid advice can be trusted in office.

Maybe Vella was worried that his questioners would see through Labour’s ongoing and compulsive rewriting of history.

At the rate they’re going, it will be the MLP that got Malta into the EU, heroically overcoming the objections of the reactionary and negative thugs of the Partit Nazzjonalista. And that was after Dom Mintoff achieved independence and defied the full might of the British army.

Whatever the reason he chose to highlight his opportunism, Vella should count himself lucky that there was a deal in place within the major political groupings that allowed him and all his colleagues to get the nod.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20