No matter how much he may rub you the wrong way, you’ve just got to hand it to the man.

First he played these Islands’ 400,000 citizens for consummate suckers and now he’s well on his way to doing the same to the EU’s 400 million.

He palmed off on us his 170-page manifesto as his electoral programme, not finding room to squeeze in a few more lines about the only major plank in his platform that would be underpinning his term of office if elected.

Maybe it was Dom Mintoff’s and Alfred Sant’s principles that rendered each of them blind to such low-hanging fruit.

Seems they missed the trees for the wood.

A long-standing platitude of local politics has been that of making Malta a bridge between Europe and Africa. That idea has now been extrapolated to include all other continents and any tract of inhabited land in-between.

Smack in the middle of the sea that is in the middle of this planet, we have now truly made this dime-sized outcrop of rock a focal point of sorts, and not for all the right reasons.

A few weeks into his term in office and we had him pitching his polished sales talk about a permanent link to Gozo: a bridge or an undersea tunnel? What we did not know was that he had already applied the finishing touches to the secret tunnel that would unite the rest of the world to Europe and divide these islands as never before since Mintoff’s feud with Archbishop Michael Gonzi.