If Pastizzigate has established anything, it is that no politician (Salvu Mallia excepted) understands the social media the way Joseph Muscat does. He walks three European prime ministers into a Rabat bar and orders tea and pastizzi – a staged visit – and it’s like he’s waved a shiny object at a cage of monkeys.

Almost everyone – from Ann Fenech, the tone-deaf president of the PN executive council, on down – shook the cage on cue, beyond Muscat’s wildest expectations. Even his critics ended up reinforcing the same coded message he was trying to get across.

There are those who say the whole affair is a storm in a tea glass – blown out of all proportion given the rampant corruption and disgraced public figures – judges, ministers, chairs of public authorities, consultants – governing us. True.

But stopping there means you don’t even try to understand why Muscat went for the ploy to begin with. Or why – Labour trolls apart – so many people, fans and critics, went along with it.

Those who say a visit to is-Serkin in Rabat is about immersion in Maltese cultural authenticity need a crash course in self-awareness. No place could be less representative of Maltese village bars.

First off, a minor but not insignificant point. As a casual conversation with even the best pastizzara will establish, Maltese consumption of pastizzi is significantly down. You can see it in the fewer rounds that pastizzi vans make in the village, as compared with 25 years ago. It is a rare village customer these days who’ll even order a dozen. If you hear yourself saying, “Five (ricotta) and five (peas)”, it’s probably a Sunday, you’ve just heard Mass, and you’re feeling immortal.

In other words, a bar famous for drawing people to its pastizzi is not a typical bar. It’s a niche bar where the act of buying pastizzi (not just eating them) is itself something devoutly to be consumed.

Next, going into an ordinary village bar is not a classless performance. On the contrary. Class and status distinctions are highlighted. You’d have to be naive or supremely patronising to think that the regulars can’t immediately read social distinctions off the walk, the talk and the clothes.

Above all, there is the unwritten gender code, beyond words, rooted only in a practical fuzzy sense of what ‘feels right’. An ordinary village bar is one where you will not see local women sitting – only tourists and Maltese women who count as ‘tourists’. Local women might zip in and out but the bar itself is construed as a male space.

In this, too, is-Serkin is exceptional in hosting, so often, large crowds of men and women. But, once more, it shows an amazing lack of self-awareness to believe that therefore the Rabat bar is a melting pot where distinctions of class and gender are dissolved.

Under Joseph Muscat, class inequality is becoming more polarised

Far from a place where such distinctions are dissolved, is-Serkin is a place where one makes a show of ignoring them. You know they exist but you pretend they don’t. And you pat yourself on the back for transgressing the boundaries.

That’s the reason why is-Serkin is such a social magnet, why early morning pastizzi parties are not evenly distributed across the island (despite there being superior pastizzi elsewhere). It’s not just about having pastizzi in a village bar.

It’s about being seen to do so – or being able to narrate going to a place everyone’s heard about – so that you can flaunt your savoir-vivre and social connoisseurship. Just like all those people who have a cartwheel hanging on their sitting room wall, or who decorate their maisonette’s garden with a faux rubble wall.

For the price of a pastizz, you can engage in the snobbery of being an anti-snob. The is-Serkin experience includes a flutter of transgression – a theatre of classlessness while real class inequality lives on.

Intuitively or articulately, Muscat knows this. The meaning of taking three prime ministers to that bar included the idea of transgression – that he, Muscat, is not held back by taboos of protocol and is cool enough to take his friends to places he really enjoys.

Notice the double-sided message. On the one hand, if he takes three prime ministers to an informal bar, it shows just how much of a pal and equal he is with each of them. On the other, it also shows how, despite being so exalted as to have prime ministers for pals, he has retained his oh-so-ordinary pleasures.

And to hell with the buttoned-up critics who have forgotten what ordinary pleasures are and who wouldn’t know how to strike up real friendships with European counterparts. (Enter, on cue, Fenech, with tales of how things were done half a century ago.)

Hang on, how do we know he meant this message to come across? Because he staged it. We know he staged it because he publicised the event. (We can imagine the prime minister of Belgium or Luxembourg taking fellow prime ministers to a favourite haunt – but when was the last time one of them publicised it? Or felt the need to show he was pals with other prime ministers?)

So Muscat gets to portray himself as a classless prime minister, creating a new middle class during working hours and dissolving class boundaries in his spare time, with an alert eye on his target audience for whom transgressing class boundaries is a thing of beauty, an aesthetic experience, like a faux rubble wall or ripped-up jeans.

Except that it’s a fantasy. Muscat is the prime minister, par excellence, of the class of monied opportunists and speculators. Under him, class inequality is becoming more polarised. Public property is being raided and privatised. The enjoyment of public space and the natural environment is becoming increasingly a matter of privilege that fewer of us can afford.

But Pastizzigate shows how so many of us can still not recognise this. Real social class differences have to do with property ownership and working conditions. But Muscat plays on the illusion that they have to do with what we consume and our conceits.

ranierfsadni@europe.com