When the Opposition Leader gave Labour supporters a choice of things to do with their voting document on EU referendum day, instead of giving them unequivocal instructions to get in there and tick the box marked “No”, we thought it was rather odd. After all, if you want to get your message across in a referendum, the clearest way to do it is by ticking the box marked “Yes” or the box marked “No”, not by refusing to vote.

Those who stay away simply send out the message that they don’t care enough about the question to actually vote on it, that it was all the same to them. Two years ago, Labour supporters realised this, and instead of staying home and playing OXO on their voting document, they went out and voted “No” – or “Yes”.

Now here we have the Pope, telling Italian Catholics not to vote in a referendum on whether to make laws on assisted reproduction less strict than they are (they are already fairly liberal). There are not, in Italy, huge numbers of people who are committed to the literal letter of Catholic law. You only have to look at their secular attitude to just about everything to see this.

For one thing, they have the lowest birth rate in Europe, and it’s unlikely to be the result of what our Commissioner for Children calls “natural methods”, but of abortion (it was legalised there 30 years ago) and contraception. So by staying away, these committed Catholics who obey the Pope’s referendum order will not be affecting the outcome particularly – no more than Alfred Sant did when he issued similar instructions.

But suppose there were vast numbers of them, enough to shape the result of the referendum by staying away instead of going into the polling-booth and ticking the “No” box? Why then – the result is obvious to rational people: the Yes vote will win and the laws on assisted reproduction will become more liberal. In other words, by obeying the Pope and refusing to vote in the referendum, they will ensure that the result they don’t want is precisely the one they will get.

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In a society that is secular, rather than sectarian, it is the State and not the Church which makes the laws. The only influence the Church has is the influence of the voting documents that its members have, just like the rest of us. Italy, which curls round the independent Vatican State, is one of the most secular states of all, the last remaining bastion of communism in Europe (we forget that it still has a thriving communist party and energetic communist media).

There, more than anywhere, the Catholic Church has no special powers to influence politicians into the enactment of laws in keeping with Catholic teachings. We saw that very clearly when Italy legislated for divorce and abortion several decades ahead of Ireland. Therefore it goes without saying that, if the Catholic Church cannot use influence in Italy – the way it is said that it does in Malta – then it must use the powers that it does have.

These powers are the same as those of all ordinary citizens and organised lobby groups, and are mainly centred on the ability to round up supporters to use their vote in a way that will influence change. Had the Pope instructed Italian Catholics to go out and vote “No”, this number of “No” votes, added to those of the people who object on humanist, moral or ethical grounds, might just swing the vote against making the laws more liberal. By staying at home, they’re doing the opposite. That’s no way to fight for what you believe in.

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I am almost beginning to pity the Opposition Leader, haunted as he is by the ghosts of Labour premiers past. His brief tenure as prime minister was brought to an abrupt end when Dom Mintoff decided to halt the proceedings and give Malta a leg-up into the European Union.

And now, enter stage left Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, another great figure from our past. He has locked horns with his immediate successor, about the European Constitution, calling him “illogical” and his arguments “absurd”.

“The same person who urged the electorate to abstain in the EU referendum is now telling us that it is stupid to abstain from a vote on the European Constitution,” said Dr Mifsud Bonnici – the man who was once our prime minister. He accused Dr Sant of being inconsistent by voting against the Accession Treaty two years ago and now saying he would vote for it.

Sometimes, we should be grateful for inconsistency, and this is one of them. After all we endured up to two years ago, it would be quite awful to now have the government and the opposition at absolute and intransigent loggerheads over what to do about the European Constitution. We really can do with far fewer of these battles.

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Some people in Sliema are trying to prevent the partial demolition of a house on the grounds that it is “baroque”, and “possibly the oldest house in Sliema”. When I saw a picture of this house in the newspaper, what I thought was the impolite version of “balderdash”. The house is round the corner from where I grew up, and there is nothing remotely baroque about it, just as there isn’t anything baroque about even the tiniest part of Stella Maris Parish – or for that matter, any part of Sliema’s other parishes.

Sliema is a new town, built mainly between the late 19th Century and the 1920s, like the house in which I grew up, the other houses that lined both sides of the same street, and both sides of all the other streets around. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, before everyone started to want to live in Sliema and become like the tal-pepe people they mocked, before large blocks of flats had to be built to accommodate the newcomers while the original inhabitants beat a retreat at the incursion, each of Sliema’s three parishes was distinctly homogenous.

The house that has made the news is in Stella Maris parish, which was made up largely of summer houses built by comfortably-off Valletta families who wanted to escape the stuffy air of the city in the summer, and be close to the “swimming baths” that are still cut into the rocky foreshore. There were also a few tiny houses built by fishermen. As transport improved, some families chose to stay there year-round, commuting to Valletta, and others followed suit.

More and more houses were built. Sliema spread from its original core right down to St Julian’s. Smaller, poorer houses sprang up to house those who now saw Sliema as the early 20th Century equivalent of a dormitory town, a place where they could live within walking distance of the city where they worked.

A large part of Sliema is really not smart at all, and never was. It is a warren of little, narrow streets, crammed with tiny, two-up/two-down (sometimes even one-up/one-down) houses. For the outsider, it is enough to be able to say that he lives in Sliema. A Sliema person born and bred will want to know: where in Sliema?

But that’s by-the-by. The point is that none of these houses were built in the Baroque period, or in the Baroque style at any other time. If there was any architectural style at all, it was firmly and resolutely that of the English town-house: late Victorian, Edwardian and art nouveau.

Even if one knows nothing about architecture and the very recent evolution of Sliema, commonsense and a basic schoolchild’s knowledge of Maltese history should be enough to make it clear that there could have been no “Sliema” in the Baroque period.

At that time piracy was endemic in the Mediterranean. Even the British, in the first half of the 19th Century, had to contend with pirates. Baroque Malta was subjected to repeat raids by the corsairs of the so-called Barbary Coast – that is, the North African beaches just a short sailing trip away, where we now disport ourselves on white sand in August.

The Knights couldn’t defend the whole of Malta and Gozo. They left Gozo completely undefended (at a certain point, people had to be bribed to go and live there because it was so risky), and most of the population jammed itself into those parts of the islands that were reasonably defended by fortifications or high cliffs.

That part of the coast where Sliema now stands was completely open and undefended, and to make things easier for the pirates from Djerba, it had a very accessible foreshore. Only somebody with a death-wish would have built a solitary house there in the late 17th Century, and taken up residence. He might as well have put a beacon on his roof and a large banner with the words: “Come on, Barbarossa – I’m yours for the taking”.

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I should also add that the house they are making all this fuss about is particularly unattractive, with no redeeming features. It always struck me as an ungainly oddity each time I traipsed past on my way to Kekina the grocer or when obliged to go to church. It always seemed to be cowering at the feet of the rather lovely Villa Bianchi, where a supermarket now stands, like some craven servant before his splendid, dramatic mistress. If Villa Bianchi went without a whisper, then what’s all the fuss about this strange-looking house? It’s all such a storm in a teacup.