When the current generation of young people in Malta will reach old age, they will paraphrase Charles Dickens for the young people of the future in order to describe to them what it was like in their own time.

They will tell them: “It was the ‘best of times’; it was the worst of times; it was the age of prosperity, it was the age of greed and corruption; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

“There was a ‘king’ with a square jaw and a ‘queen’ with a fair face on the ‘throne’ of Malta... it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes that things in general were settled forever.”