On my bedroom wall, when I was 13 years old, there was a poster of The Boomtown Rats, pulled out of Jackie magazine. It showed lead singer Bob Geldof looking like he had just crawled through a hedgerow, while fellow band member Johnny Fingers wore striped pyjamas. I can’t remember the other four, or what they looked like. They’ve disappeared into that miasma called “I wonder what became of them?”, though I hear that they are suing Mr Geldof for proceeds from the sale of records, which they say he has kept for himself. The case will be settled this year.

The Boomtown Rats were the biggest thing in new music at the time. It was 1978, and their album, A Tonic for the Troops, had stormed into the charts, staying there for a year. A single from that album, Rat Trap, streaked straight to No. 1.

Then came Like Clockwork, and She’s So Modern. They were on the playlist at every basement, garage and waterpolo pitch party that we went to, the anthems for my generation. The Boomtown Rats were not a one-hit wonder, though they are forever linked in the public mind with their 1979 single, I Don’t Like Mondays. They were huge already when it was released, but within a couple of years all of that had fizzled out.

How odd life is. Fast forward 28 years and instead of choosing to go to Bob Geldof’s concert on Manoel Island, I opted for the business breakfast fund-raiser organised by HSBC and Vodafone yesterday, at which Mr Geldof was the keynote speaker. It cost rather more, and there was no music. But to the woman who has no interest in reliving her teenage years, and who has oil paintings and cartoons on her wall rather than Jackie posters, it was infinitely the better choice.

I loved hearing him speak – not just for what he said, but for how he said it. A recording (the beautiful Mandy Azzopardi was there filming it all) should be sent to every politician in this country to show them what public speaking is all about, and that it is not about pompous demagoguery, with platitudes delivered in a flat monotone, using vocabulary as limited as that of the Janet & John Ladybird books, to an audience presumed to be intellectually subnormal.

Bob Geldof still looks like he’s just crawled through a hedgerow, only now his hair is white because he’ll be 55 next birthday, and his face is as crumpled as his clothes, which strangely makes him look better. Well, we won’t go into the ways “I’ve” changed since 1978.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that I hated I Don’t Like Mondays then, and I hate it now. But I probably don’t hate it as much as Bob Geldof does. When one of the audience thanked him for helping him through Monday mornings, Mr Geldof looked at his watch, and said: “I’ve been wondering when that joke was going to come in. It took all of 40 minutes. Can you imagine, 30 years of hearing the same joke?” And of being expected to sing the same song, too – that must be mind-numbing.

There were rather a lot of important businessmen there, yesterday morning. I was bemused by the fact that they had come to hear him speak as a campaigning rock star, when the reality is that his rock star days are rather far behind him, and the money he made in the late 1970s has long since been spent. He made his present fortune by building businesses and selling them on for many millions of pounds: a television production company and an on-line travel booking company are among these.

He retains a shareholding in other operations, including a media business whose clients are blue chip corporations, and this is where the bulk of his income comes from. He’s a shrewd, sharp businessman, but I rather suspect that few among his business audience knew that this is what he does for a living.

He did let slip a clue, though, when he said in that understated way of the truly secure: “I run a couple of businesses, and if somebody were to come to me after crossing thousands of miles of desert from Mauritania, looking for a job, I don’t care how many degrees he has or hasn’t got, I’ll give him a job. Anybody who is prepared to go through all that to find work already has a comparative advantage over others.”

I’m glad he said it, to that particular audience. It’s what I tried to explain myself, in my column last Thursday, when I wrote about the book Bloody Foreigners: that anybody with the drive to undergo such a high-risk, dangerous, win-all, lose-all strategy has the natural makings of an entrepreneur. Anybody who has walked across a desert to escape, or who has crossed hundreds of miles of sea in a rickety boat, is going to be one hell of a hard worker. He or she isn’t going to be doing much whining, complaining, or shirking. That’s why the United States of America, in 100 years roughly between 1850 and 1950, completely outstripped the ancient civilisations of Europe in terms of development.

It was built by people like that: desperate people who took the risk of crossing the ocean to a great unknown, with only the clothes on their back. Europe, meanwhile, is populated by the complacent inhabitants of a giant welfare state. Nobody has to take risks to survive anymore, so the gains which, like losses, are the consequence of risk-taking are just not happening. It’s not a coincidence that the biggest fortunes in Britain are now being built by those of immigrant stock.

***

Mr Geldof’s talk was billed as being about corporate responsibility. I couldn’t see him talking about that as I had read about his views and already knew what they are: that corporate involvement in social issues is a public relations exercise, with social benefit as a by-product. He didn’t talk about corporate involvement at all, and only mentioned his view briefly when specifically asked about it.

The gist of his talk was Africa, third world debt, the flow of emigrants out of the African sub-continent, their impact on Malta, how the flow won’t stop until the messes which these people are fleeing are sorted out. All of this came out of his general theme of social responsibility – not “corporate” social responsibility, but that which should be borne by us all.

The money we paid to be there was going to the shelter for the homeless, run by the YMCA in Valletta. It was wonderful stuff. He’s probably repeated the same things a hundred times over or more, to different audiences, but still he kept us listening.

The facts of what he said are reported elsewhere, so I won’t go into those. Though he tried to say it himself, without being specific because that would be boastful (we wouldn’t think much of anyone who said “Look at me, I’m a terrific success story”) he is the perfect example of the risk-taking immigrant who puts to business use the very same drive and character traits that pushed him to flee his country with nothing.

Bob Geldof isn’t British. He’s Irish – from the Republic of Ireland, that is, and not from Northern Ireland, which forms part of Britain. He left Ireland alone in his late teens, with nothing, because he saw no future there. He went to London and slept in the streets. For three months, he lived in an airport, disappearing among the crowds, sleeping among all the delayed passengers. Yesterday, he said: “I left Ireland when I was a kid and Ireland was the poorest country in Europe. I didn’t mind being homeless, because my home sucked.” Even in Ireland, Mr Geldof came from immigrant stock. Geldof isn’t an Irish surname. His grandfather was a Belgian immigrant.

The guts, determination, ambition and personality (and the shrewd business acumen kept carefully hidden beneath the glamorous rock star image) are what drove Mr Geldof to escape the dire poverty of his home country in an attempt at making something of his life, even if it meant sleeping on the streets. He has made more of his life than any of us in that room yesterday ever have or ever will. He has made more money than even the wealthiest person there – through business acumen, not through music. He has done more for the good of others. He is one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Once, he was a teenage, penniless and homeless immigrant.

Most of us there yesterday were born into comfort, to a greater or lesser degree, and the only reason we ever thought about fleeing our country was stultifying and pernicious boredom. That was not enough. “I’m bored” is not as great a spur to action as “I’m hungry” or “I’m desperate” or “I have no work, no money, no future, and people are being killed in the streets.”

***

He is not Sir Bob, Sir Bob Geldof, or – horrors – Sir Geldof. “Sir Bob” is just a nickname used by the British tabloids. He wasn’t knighted, still less “nominated Sir”, as it was put in the introduction to his talk yesterday. He is an Irish citizen who received an honorary knighthood from the British monarch, and so the correct form of address is Mr Geldof. He is Bob Geldof, KBE – which stands for Knight of the British Empire.

Sorry to sound like a hectoring lecturer on correct form, but these things are not trivialities – unless you also consider not spitting at table or wiping your mouth with your hand to be a triviality. Addressing somebody correctly is as important as getting their name right. Calling him Sir Bob is like calling the president of Malta “his royal highness”, or addressing his wife as “your ladyship”. It’s too gross an error, and too embarrassing, to be glossed over.

Mr Geldof is neither a British subject nor a citizen of a commonwealth realm, of which there are 16. These are sovereign states, like Australia, which recognize Queen Elizabeth II as their monarch. Sir Anthony Mamo was Sir Anthony (not, dear heavens, Sir Mamo) because he was a British subject when he was knighted, in 1959. After 1974, when Malta became a republic and we ceased to recognise the British queen as our monarch, no Maltese could be knighted, as opposed to receiving an honorary knighthood. And so it is with the Irish citizen, Bob Geldof, KBE.