Ah, the perils of living in such a small society. I have just received a text message from a girlfriend. “I’m sitting in Charles Grech in Valletta. It’s full of HMS Illustrious personnel. What a relief! Men who look like men and not like Barbary apes.”

Well, they do say that all the nice girls love a sailor, but truly, the talent landscape must have been a lot easier on the eye for earlier generations of ladies, before the Sixth Fleet and the Royal Navy left for good. They had something to look at. Men in Malta, doubtless, have the same sort of complaints, and wouldn’t mind the occasional warship packed full of...what, exactly? Former Soviet bloc models, I suppose, though after they’ve been shrunk in the wash.

***

Now on to more serious matters: I’m glad to see those naysayers and self-righteous German vegetarian lesbian communists and muesli-eaters get their come-uppance with Tonio Borg approved by a comfortable majority.  They were longing for him to fail, or to scrape through narrowly so that they could gloat and sneer, and that just put me in the highly ironic position of rooting for him, largely so that I wouldn’t have to be on their side. Nothing gets my back up like a self-professed liberal who is anything but, or one of those irritating true socialists (not the Maltese variety, who are right-wing). I used to love to rub them the wrong way in conversation, but now I just leave their presence as quickly as possible, before they have time to start on about the sort of stuff that makes me want to blow cigarette smoke in their faces, devour a piglet (preferably alive) and say in a very loud voice that God hates gays and we should bring back the death penalty, and how about a spot of hunting tomorrow?

I don’t share those of Tonio Borg’s views which are formed primarily by religion rather than common sense and respect for individual liberties, but it is precisely because I respect his individual liberty to hold those views that I have absolutely no wish to punish him for them. And his personal choices are not going to impinge on my mine. Nor is he going to be in a position to undo secularism in the European Union, repeal abortion laws across all member states (bar the usual suspects Ireland, Poland and Malta) and tell us that we are no longer allowed to divorce. Is he going to begin dismantling anti-discrimination laws that protect the rights of homosexuals? No, he is not. So when you boil it down to its essence, the votes against Tonio Borg were not ‘I don’t think you can do the job properly’ but ‘I wish to punish you for your views’.

Of course, I can think of several instances when it would be entirely appropriate to avoid voting for somebody because of their views. This is the basis of parliamentary democracy. Every five years, we vote for the people whose views we like or share, and don’t vote for those we dislike or whose views are anathema to us. But that’s different, and in any case, there are no votes against. The EU Commissioner is there to do a job. If he can do it, there’s hardly a problem because he voted against divorce or was an idiot with Gift of Life back home. Those aspects of his thinking and behaviour were problems for us, in Malta, where Tonio Borg was (and technically still is, until he resigns his seat in parliament) a legislator. Now, he is in a different environment, and it looks like he has begun to grow up fast already, outside the cosy cocoon of Maltese political life. He seems to have got a bit of a shock, and that can only be helpful.

The European Commission is teeming with Roman Catholics. Its president, Jose Manuel Barroso, is a Roman Catholic. The difficulty is not the religion, as so many people here in Malta seem to think (because we labour under the strange assumption that only Maltese are proper Catholics), but the inability to understand that the more sophisticated and civilised a society and individuals are, the more likely they are to keep religion a private matter. You don’t shove your religion down my throat and I won’t shove mine down yours. That’s the way it works.

Unfortunately, in Malta religion is not private but worn proudly as a badge of identity, almost as though we have no other, or need some kind of identity in the first place because what we are in ourselves is not enough. That doesn’t wash at all elsewhere. The newest EU Commissioner is rapidly discovering that it is best to keep your beliefs private, not out of fear, but simply out of respect for others who don’t want to know about them, and might be upset. It’s good manners, that’s all.