Is anyone able to tell me why so many people were inconvenienced by so few for such a paucity of results? Apart from allowing Premier Joseph an assortment of opportunities to hobnob and phot-op with the Great and the Good, as a precursor to CHOGM, another shindig the relevance of which is less than immediately obvious, that is to say.

Obviously, it’s about time the rest of the world was made conscious of the problems being faced by human beings in the south – and I don’t mean the Italians, Greeks and Spanish, either – but what was the point of the rest of the world being foisted on us to discuss the toss?

It’s not as if the leaders of the free world, or such of them as turned up, were going to get a first-hand view of what it means to be an immigrant from the Third World (am I allowed to use that phrase?) because along with everything else that our lords and masters thought would be offensive to them (such as students, shoppers, lousy roads, street lights not working, parked cars) the immigrants were shoved under the carpet.

I suppose it was essential for the Big Nabobs to come here to discuss something that can be discussed anywhere, for the symbolic significance of gracing a country so radically affected by immigration with their august presence, as it were.

When you think about it, that monument to unoriginality that was erected on Castille Square to commemorate the success of the Immigration Summit before it even started sums it all up

The catch is, to start with, it’s highly debatable whether we are affected by immigration particularly, given that the Italians seem to have graciously, without even a glance at their own oily interests, opted to take the strain for us.

And, to be going on, the Big Nabobs, being swept as they were from place to place in the luxury of their air-conditioned chariots, won’t have actually spotted any immigrants.

Incidentally, please forgive any lapse from the correct tense as you read this, it’s not easy to ensure that you keep your ducks in a row when you’re writing a couple of days before an event, to be read after it. And for all I know, the Brits will have screwed up the security arrangements and everything will have gone belly, not to mention other portions of the anatomy, up and the summit never even took place.

Smart move that on the part of Premier Joe – appoint a bunch of clowns to take care of things that are CHOGM-related, then put on a completely different event a week or so before, get other people to take responsibility for it, and whatever goes wrong in either case, you can put the blame on someone else.

After all, the Great Unwashed already think that it was Premier Joe that got us into Europe and that it was the Nasty Nats that had fought to keep us out, so that Premier Joe’s passports wouldn’t be worth peanuts. While on the subject of peanuts, incidentally, what price our national contribution to the funds being made available for alleviating immigration-related problems?

We were favoured with the glorious sight of the Deputy PM, letting the world know that we’re putting our hands in our pockets for the splendiferous sum of a quarter of a mill, about eighteen months’ worth of the amount we pay Minister the Hon. Sai’s Husband Mizzi’s wife to refurbish a non-existent consulate in Shanghai.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

When you think about it, that monument to unoriginality that was erected on Castille Square to commemorate thesuccess of the Immigration Summit before it even started (spot the stupidity, right there?) sums it all up.

Premier Joe’s attitude towards thepeople who elected him is encapsulated in the overall concept, that of getting knotted, right from the get-go.

You then get the ambivalence of the impression given: from some angles it looks like that which the pooch deposits and which should be scooped up in a handy plastic bag, while from others it looks like the gesture made by the vulgar, accompanied since Shakespeare’s day at least by the imprecation “a Spanish Fig to you, sirrah”.

All in all, the thing should be dedicated to the environmentalists, with a plaque reading: “Next time, careful what you wish for, love and have a bale of hay, Premier Joe.”

You gotta larf, I suppose, as you have to at the sight of battalions of rude mechanicals deployed all over the place turning the roads through which the Big Nabobs will pass (and only those roads) into shining examples of cleanliness and perfection, while the rest of the country slumps into neglect and slovenliness, taking its lead from the incompetent clowns that rule our roost.

As symbolic in its way as the “Get Knotted” pustule that has sprouted in front of Premier Joe’s hang-out is the Gay Pride Zebra Crossing in Floriana, which has also been given a shiny new lick of paint, because, you know, this is what makes us a tolerant, liberal, European nation.

What seems to have escaped the people who revel in the warm glow of pointless symbolism is the consideration that for a good many of the people who are coming for the CHOGM party, being gay is actually illegal and/or evidence of aberrance.

Is some hero of the LGBTIQSWERTY movement going to throw himself down onto the multi-coloured stripey thingy as the leader of a country that bashes gays zooms past, I wonder?

Somehow, I doubt it. He won’t be allowed within a hundred of metres of the route to start with and anyway, he will have to be attending on the minister, who will herself be lined up neatly with a grin on her face, to shake the hands of the heads of government that will have rolled up to take advantage of Premier Joe’s eagerness to be seen with them.

And in the meantime, of course, our ministers of state will continue going around denying political responsibility for anything done under their watch while demanding that the Opposition takes responsibility for everything that happened under theirs, for all the world as if they hadn’t already done so by being voted out.

It’s so amusing that in the Little Valley of the Po, where the political mindset of people like Premier Joe and his minions is firmly rooted, you can do what you like, when you like and how you like (not to mention to whom and with whom you like) and as long as you can point a finger at real or imagined stupidities that the previous bunch have fallen into, you’re free and clear and the people love you.

That’s what you get, I suppose, when self-styled guardians of journalistic freedom plant themselves in front of parliamentary committees and delude themselves that their personal opinions are the stuff of Pulitzer-winning reportage.