It is astonishing to see how the essential point is missed, in the news that there will be no figurative statue of Dom Mintoff in Castile Place, that there should never have been plans for one at all. This does not apply only to Mintoff, but to the rest of them. It seems to have been accepted as read, in this daft country, that all a prime minister or head of state has to do to deserve commemoration in perpetuity, by means of a statue in a public square, is drop dead.

In the civilised world, statues of political figures are the exception and not the norm; he or she must have been truly outstanding in some special way. And that is quite apart from the fact that the tradition has fallen into disuse. Nobody puts up statues of politicians anymore. There is a statue of Margaret Thatcher inside her old stomping-ground – not outside on a public square – but I don’t think the British have any plans to clutter up the esplanade at Westminster with statues of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and John Major when they pop their clogs. As for a statue of Edward Heath – well, enough said.

There is no policy on statues of dead politicians and heads of state in Malta, so they’re making it up as they go along. Right now, the consensus seems to be that when they go into the ground, a statue must go up above ground. We seem to be missing a statue of Agatha Barbara and another of Anthony Mamo (unless memory fails me), but all the other dead presidents and prime ministers are commemorated in statues: Censu Tabone, Guido Demarco, George Borg Olivier, Dom Mintoff (yes, have you forgotten already – there’s a new statue up in Bormla), Paul Boffa, and in the fullness of time we will also have Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Eddie Fenech Adami, George Abela and, God help us, Joseph Muscat and Marie Louise Coleiro Preca.

This is so ridiculous. Aside from the ramifications of commemorating presidents and prime ministers purely on the basis that they served and died, we should have strong aesthetic objections. The Mintoff statue planned for Castile Place was and remains objectionable not just because the man was utterly foul and did much to damage Malta, but also because it’s a lousy job. I looked at the specimen shown in the newspapers, from all angles, and was appalled at the clumsiness of the execution.

Malta is shabby enough as it is. Most of the buildings are beyond hideous, the result of a mixture of execrable taste and disastrous planning decisions. Do we now have to clutter up the place with awful statues? The men in question were not/are not physically beautiful in life, regardless of their other attributes, some of them magnificent. In the hands of incompetent sculptors, what you have is a line-up of unprepossessing men preserved for posterity in bad art, an urban zoo of dead prime ministers and heads of state.

And those who were delighted to hear that there will be no statue of Mintoff at Castile Place missed the far more important part of that bit of news: there will be a memorial to him instead, and the government has asked for suggestions. I can think of a few, and probably you can too, but let us be civilised about it, shall we?

The decision to convert the buildings at Dock No. 1 in Cospicua for use by young Muslim men from the Gulf States and the Middle East, who will be students at the anything-but-American university-teaching-just-five-subjects-including-computer-games, represents yet more cockeyed urban planning on the hoof. People talk of Cospicua and Birgu as two separate towns, but in reality what you are dealing with here is a narrow creek with buildings on either side of it, so narrow that there is a foot-bridge across it. There is no ‘Birgu waterfront’ versus ‘Cospicua waterfront’; it is a single continuous waterfront that runs round the creek.

In this very small space, we are now going to have a super-yacht marina where some of the world’s most magnificent yachts berth from time to time, a Maritime Museum, restaurants which are struggling to be thought of as smart, crumbling palaces being put on the market for a small fortune and converted to chi-chi boutique hotels aimed at the discerning money-pots traveler, and… a business-cum-computer games college for proposed thousands of young men from the Middle East in search of an easy piece of paper from a shady diploma mill owned by a Jordanian contractor called Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah.

Even if they were not going to be young men from the Middle East and the Gulf States, but a balanced gender-mix of students from all over Europe, you simply do not plonk a college or university somewhere that is striving to regenerate itself for the up market visitor and resident. “This will push up property prices in Cospicua and Birgu,” one wide-eyed speculator said. Wrong, how wrong that is: as soon as you put a large college or university in a neighbourhood, property prices plunge. The people who don’t mind living in their converted town-palaces near random druggies, unemployed men and prostitutes in a place that has recherché chique will mind immensely living in a place clogged up with hordes of students. The only exception to this rule is when the university is a real one and rather glamorous: Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Would I buy a house next to a college set up by a Jordanian contractor for male students from the Gulf? Most definitely not.

 

 

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