To be slightly facetious, the best thing about CHOGM is that it’s over.

One assumes that the leaders did have some serious business to discuss and that the meeting served to promote personal networking between them.

What they agreed upon in the final declarations is now a matter of public knowledge and reads quite well. From the environment, as a result of President Hollande’s visit and today’s conference in Paris, to issues such as development, poverty and migration, the leaders came up with the right noises.

But there was far more at stake than the simultaneous presence in Malta of so many leaders.

The presence and the visit by the Queen merits a comment by itself. The Queen is well-loved in Britain and equally here, not just because of the two years she and her husband spent here so many years ago but also because of the person she is. There she was, at almost 90 years of age, keeping up with a punishing timetable, and always extremely well-presented, smiling at her interlocutors and never putting a foot wrong. And she has been doing this for so many years that most of us can ever remember.

Malta gained respect and world-wide respect for hosting not just this CHOGM but also for the EU-Africa summit a couple of weeks ago.

Yet all this could have been lost had not there been a very strict security protective cover surrounding the leaders and the Queen. In fact, now that the leaders have left, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. At last, it’s over!

It is true that Malta had some outside help with security, such as the presence of HMS Bulwark in the Grand Harbour, but most of the leg work was carried out by Maltese forces, whether AFM, police and other security services.

We are living in a very tense period, in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks, the ripple-effects of tension that followed that, the Turkey-Russia spat about the downed plane, and the huge tidal wave of migrants that have made a mockery of the European frontier system.

To be perfectly clear: there is no proof that the terrorists held back and did not attack us here during CHOGM because of these precautionary measures. We will never know if there were any plans to attack CHOGM or the Queen. Nor will we ever know if our protective and security measures were as airtight as they were made out to be. The latest Isis terror attacks in Paris show that Isis now prefers to attack perfectly normal citizens, especially the young, as they enjoy themselves, rather than attack heads of government or of state.

But anyway, now that CHOGM is over, we all breathe a huge collective sigh of relief.