This Malta Tourism Authority palaver is rapidly degenerating into a farce. As happens with virtually all committees, which is why I can’t stand them and see them as the ultimate in inefficiency, the board and the chairman seem to be overly concerned with how they are perceived. They have become the story, and what this tells us is that the job they are there to do is never going to get done. Now they have resigned en masse, except for the chairman, and the tourism minister tells us that “he does not exclude the possibility that some of them will be back again when the new members of the board are appointed.”

Please, let’s stop this clowning around. In between draft letters to consultants leaked to the press – an appalling breach of business ethics, the investigation of board members to find out who put the whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair, the public debate as to whether advertising on CNN should be reduced or not (for heaven’s sake – that’s not something that should be discussed in the press), and the prancing about and backtracking about the Brand Malta campaign, what we have here is a mess.

For a start, the tourism authority board and its various chairmen should stop confusing the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and the public’s right to know with the seemingly pressing need for confessional disclosure. Yes, the board should disclose details of deals, because public money is spent in making them. But it should not then go on to discuss every last detail of the deal made, where it is going wrong and where it is not going wrong, turning purely commercial matters into a public circus with the media as the performing ring.

In doing so, it makes itself ridiculous and defeats its own purposes. How successful can a Brand Malta campaign be, when the chairman and the board of the Malta Tourism Authority, who are paying for it, join in with the rest of Malta in running it down and criticising it? What a farce that is.

The leak of the draft letter which would have been sent to the consultant Christian Sinding was shocking. It was a complete breach of normal business ethics, and anyone who behaved like that in a commercial organisation would be sacked on the spot. This was not the act of a so-called whistleblower, because there was nothing to blow the whistle on there. A letter to a consultant expressing the organisation’s dissatisfaction with his or her work is a perfectly normal thing. The consultant then replies and the matter may be sorted out, or not.

What is not normal, on the other hand, is for someone in the organisation to leak the letter to the press before it is sent to the consultant, so that the consultant hears about it first from a reporter who calls him and reads it out to him. Do I have any way of conveying to you just how serious this is? I don’t think so. It’s terrible.

Now they’re doing it again by debating in the press whether or not to cut down on their advertising on CNN, whether it is worth the money, and whether CNN will release them from their contractual obligations. For heaven’s sake, men, get a grip.

The MTA started making a mess of things when it succumbed to the usual Maltese sickness of believing that no Maltese is capable of the job of branding Malta, and so did the usual and brought in a “foreign consultant”. Yet this is the one area in which any “foreign consultant”’ was going to have more problems than most, because to sell a product you have to know it well, and to be truly successful, you have to know your market too.

This belief in the inevitable superiority of “foreigners” – though of course, they have to be from the north or from across the Atlantic – is maddening. What is even more maddening is the forelock-tugging speed at which they are paid the northern European market rates which they demand, when a Maltese branding consultant engaged in the same capacity would do a much better job and for far less money.

He or she would have no choice but to accept far less money, because demanding the same rates that Mr Sinding is being paid would result in insulting treatment and a nasty campaign in the opposition media. Tell me about it: when I worked on the EU referendum campaign (don’t bother asking for which camp), I was paid for a year less than Mr Sinding is being paid for a month. I had to endure endless spiteful media stories and questions in parliament, including the deeply insulting and uninformed suggestion that I had only been given the job as a favour, rather than because I knew what to do. Yet the results spoke for themselves.

The Malta Tourism Authority’s consultant has come up with this silly and pointless campaign because he doesn’t know who he is talking to. Possibly, the only Maltese people he knows are the ones who have engaged him. My immediate reaction on seeing the first of the advertisements was to explode into laughter. I knew exactly what the public’s reaction would be (it’s part of my job) and sure enough, it happened. It was only a matter of days before I received the first of many spoofs, including the hilarious mock-corporate presentation “Brand x’inhi?”, which leads on to some heart-achingly funny shots from onlyinmalta.com. Christian Sinding couldn’t have known how the Maltese would react to his concept, but the board members who approved his campaign should have known this instantly. If they didn’t, then no wonder Malta can’t sell itself and has to get a Swede to do it.

* * *

If the Malta Tourism Authority must insist on its predilection for “foreign consultants” then they might as well engage the services of the television presenter Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen. He was here to make a programme about Malta, and in a brief interview with The Times, he correctly summed up why the British perceive Malta negatively as a holiday destination, and how it should be sold to them. The Malta Tourism Authority should make a few A3 photocopies of that interview and paste them up on its boardroom wall, in between sulking, quarrelling and telling the newspapers about its contractual problems with CNN.

Malta is thought of as old-fashioned, Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen said. In fact, that’s the reason he chose the place – because he is deliberately going to destinations that are perceived to be past their sell-by date. Malta has a dowdy image because of the mental link made with the age cohort of British people who served here before 1974. Nothing associated with British pensioners is ever going to be scintillatingly attractive. Malta can’t be sold on sun and sand because the beaches are “very little” – little in size, that is, as well as in number. People are less inclined to spend time in the sun, because of health reasons; they want things to see and do. Malta is very foreign and what’s foreign is also seen as glamorous (don’t we know that), and yet “everything is in English”. He is deliberately avoiding the eye on the prow of fishing-boats and the Mosta dome, and concentrating instead on St Agatha’s catacombs and the story behind the Caravaggio painting at St John’s.

It’s not a subtle difference, but a significant one. Sadly, those who sell Malta will probably be unable to pick it up, because to them the fishing-boat eye, the Mosta dome, the catacombs and the Caravaggio are all kulcer. What Malta should sell to the British now, he said, is “its link to the past but with a very firm commitment to the comforts of today.” Chance would be a fine thing.

* * *

As for that eye on the fishing-boats, all the attention it is given puts my teeth on edge. Why do the people who obsess about it imagine that it is typical of Malta? Painting an eye on the prow of fishing-boats is a centuries-old tradition throughout the Mediterranean. No way is it Maltese, and no way does it have anything to do with Osiris, the ancient Egyptian deity. That’s another myth that needs to be debunked before some intelligent tourist asks why Maltese fishermen in 2006 are painting on their boats the symbol of a god of life, death and fertility who was worshipped in Egypt 3,000 years ago, and never worshipped in Malta as far as we know.

Read my lips: it’s not the eye of Osiris and it never was the eye of Osiris. Eye symbols are used throughout the Mediterranean to ward off the evil eye. Belief in the evil eye is prevalent throughout the Mediterranean, including Malta. We even have a verb – bezzel – which means “to give someone the evil eye and cause him/her misfortune”, a verb that doesn’t exist in English because the concept doesn’t exist in Britain.

The “lucky eye” that counters the glare of the “evil eye” is especially used by fishermen, whose work puts them more at risk of danger than most. Years ago, “lucky eyes” were painted onto prows to ward off the evil eye, and that tradition has continued because many Maltese still believe in tbezzil.

I have no embarrassment in admitting that I believe in it myself, just as I believe that St Anthony finds almost everything I lose. But then, I am part of the Malta brand, or so they tell me.