“I listened to (Austin Gatt) for the best part of 20 minutes and remembered why I like his style so much, and why I’m so cross that he doesn’t stand for election in the constituency where I live, which means that I find myself constrained to vote for far less able individuals”

The lateral thinker Edward de Bono has proposed a “palace of thinking” for Malta – a place for the generation of ideas. I appreciate Professor de Bono’s enthusiasm, but really – ideas in Malta? Ideas in a place where almost nobody reads anything at all, and where thinking outside the box amounts to grilling your steak instead of frying it? Well, I don’t know.

De Bono wants to brand Malta as the “creative think-tank of the world” and he wants to do this by next year, which is the European Union’s Year of Creativity. But again, this country is hardly the apex of creativity. We produce a lot, certainly, in the way of paintings and so on, but little of it is original or innovative or even very good, and that’s because people here make a point of cutting themselves off from what’s going on in the rest of the world.

You can blame the educational system until you’re 16, but after that you’re on your own. If you don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, what’s new, what’s hot, then after the age of 16 you have no one to blame but yourself. This isn’t the island of creativity. It’s the island of hackneyed hobby-horses.

I admire Edward de Bono for his dreams in relation to his country of origin, but really – he expects too much. He wants an “imposing and iconic structure” that will attract thinkers who might come up with creative ideas in the sphere of public policy and other areas. His dream extends to having a “thinking ambassador” appointed by other countries and based at the Palace of Thinking. I can’t help but think that this sounds like a paradise for individuals best described by a coarse word that begins with “w”; and ends with “r”. We have enough people gassing around. What we don’t have is action.

Professor de Bono says that if Malta doesn’t signal its interest, then the Palace of Thinking will go to Spain, Italy or Latvia, each of which has shown interest. Well, I don’t know. What use a Palace of Thinking in a country where half of the population would vote for a two-headed alien with a policy of Mongolia in the Mediterranean, just because the two-headed Martian said so?

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I drove home from a late meeting Tuesday evening while listening to Austin Gatt give a detailed account of the MITTS “hacking” case, which turned out to be not about hacking, after all. I listened to him for the best part of 20 minutes and remembered why I like his style so much, and why I’m so cross that he doesn’t stand for election in the constituency where I live, which means that I find myself constrained to vote for far less able individuals. He gave a good, comprehensive and straightforward account of what happened, delivered in that brusque but credible voice of his. By comparison, the new Opposition Leader sounded like a nasal hand-puppet.

And when he had finished, I sat in the car eating a sausage roll which I nipped out to buy from the pastizzeria near the Mosta church and waited for the opposition to come up with their pearls of wisdom. I wasn’t disappointed.

First up was the Opposition Leader, freshly returned from Tripoli, where he met a Serbian former leader who doesn’t exist – or maybe he does exist, but the Labour Party press office got the name wrong. In that sneering tone that makes all people of good will want to give him a good slap and tell him for god’s sake to grow up, Muscat listed a series of snide remarks masquerading as questions. And I thought: how out of order; how really inappropriate. Here you had Gatt giving a blow-by-blow account over at least half an hour (when I tuned in he was already well away) and the only appropriate response from the newly-minted Opposition Leader, in his borrowed parliamentary seat, should have been along the lines of “Gosh, we really appreciate the trouble you’ve gone through, and we know you’re not to blame for some prize A-hole thinking he can pull a fast one by installing rogue software on a couple of machines, but can you reassure us about X, Y and Z?”

Instead we had the characteristic Muscat nasal whine, which makes him sound like a twerp protesting that he’s been waiting too long in the queue at a nightclub for a vodka-cranberry juice. I’m sorry, but I just can’t take the man seriously. I have trouble even considering him a man though, at his age, he is hovering on the mid-years cusp and has the evaporating hair to match.

The final straw for me was when he appeared in a press photograph greeting some old biddy and wearing a black and white striped shirt with black cuffs and a black collar. It struck a familiar note and I wondered why it annoyed me so much (quite apart from the fact that it was way beyond naff, of course). Then one of my sisters emailed me, attaching the fashion-horror pic: “Do you remember Andy-Pandy from when we were children?” Oh dear heavens, of course: his shirt was the black-and-white version of Andy-Pandy’s blue-and-white play-suit.

If some prize pigeon plays around with the state’s information technology system and tries to undermine it by stealing information, is this a government problem? No, it’s a shared problem. And Mr Muscat in his Andy-Pandy outfit had better wise up to this. His job is to join forces with the government in trying to outwit anyone who is trying to breach confidentiality in the keeping of records in the state hospital and other departments, and not to ask through his nasal passages why Austin Gatt is telling us about this now instead of telling us about it two weeks ago, when the investigations were at their height.

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I can’t understand why the Emigrants’ Commission chose to release a statement claiming that immigrant arrivals now exceed “the birth rate”. Are they really so hard-pressed for resources that they have to seek to create panic among the racist elements of our society, in an attempt at getting something done?

Comparing the birth rate, which is calculated per 1,000 of the population, to the straight annual figure for immigrant arrivals is like comparing apples with pears. You just can’t do it. And for the Emigrants’ Commission to reveal that it doesn’t quite know what the birth rate is, well, that’s a little embarrassing. Maybe they meant the annual straight figure for births? Even so, that far exceeds the annual figure for immigrant arrivals, so the Emigrants’ Commission is way off target. Funny how no reporter bothered to question the Commission’s arithmetic.

It’s not just where numbers are concerned that the Emigrants’ Commission is off the mark. It’s in its very thinking. “They” and “us” are subjective concepts. The members of Azzjoni Nazzjonali think of black Africans as They. On the other hand, “they” is how I think of the members of Azzjoni Nazzjonali. I would rather be outnumbered by peaceable and intelligent black Africans than by people like Josie Muscat, Melkim Seychell, Norman Lowell and their followers. That, to me, would be a horrible nightmare.

I really can’t stand the way that those who mainly inhabit the sink-pit of Maltese society somehow think we are all in this together and that we have everything in common purely on the basis that we all have a Maltese passport and were born and brought up here. I don’t have anything at all in common with the people of AN and Imperium Europa, and there is no way I could countenance spending five minutes in their company, let alone marrying somebody so alien and making a life with them. This is what the self-satisfied members of AN and Imperium Europa fail to understand: to people who think as I do, it is they who are the undesirable aliens. Ship them all out, I say – preferably on rickety boats and without provisions. Malta would be better off without them. Let some civilised Africans in instead.