The Arrogant Army has intensified its operations over the last few weeks, filling the newspapers and airwaves with the word ‘arrogant’ and claiming to speak on behalf of The People.

We are never told who The People are, and those of us who do not feel the same way are left with the niggling sensation that perhaps we are not people too. Perhaps we are Stepford Wives, or things that have crawled out of a bog and have yet to evolve limbs.

The Arrogant Army began with people from my old hometown and social group, who remain its loudest, most persistent and increasingly tiresome members. They hardly fit what comes first to mind when speaking of The People. I imagine that they reciprocate my sentiment and find me loud, persistent and increasingly tiresome too, but unlike them I confine myself to two newspaper columns, because I am paid to do so, and to a website, which is an investment, and do not spread myself liberally like loose jam all over the print and broadcast media, there to grind my axes for the sheer hell of it. If you want to avoid me, you can.

The ranks of the Arrogant Army have since been bolstered by Joseph Muscat and his Collation of Change, and this is the new movement about which he speaks. It is a strange movement, one which is made up of people who have absolutely nothing in common except the belief that everyone is arrogant except themselves.

Whenever I read the tirades of those who would have us believe that they speak for The People, I am left with the oddest feeling that what really gets their goat is not the thing which they are ostensibly criticising, but the fact that they are not the ones making the decisions or among the expert few who are being consulted. That is why I find it important to mention their social group and background: these are people brought up with a sense of entitlement and the belief that they know better than the inferior classes. Unfortunately, in their eyes, the government is made up almost exclusively of members of those inferior classes who are at the same time socially too close for comfort. Yes, they now have a Labour Party they feel comfortable with, but not in the way that you would at first think.

It is a Labour Party which allows them to feel comfortably superior without being revolted or frightened, and which acknowledges – overtly or otherwise – their social superiority and surpassing knowledge in most things. It allows them to feel democratic while, in their minds, slumming it in a hip way by patronising their social inferiors.

They will hate me for saying it even more than they do already – class traitor that I am – but so what? I find their attitude completely insufferable, silly, shallow and deeply boring. They come across as the bunch of kids who believe they have been left out in the cold too long, and who are now planning The Revenge of the Nerds – or perhaps that should be Revenge on the Nerds.

Though ‘arrogant’ has become the favourite insult of the chattering classes, were they to stop and think for a moment they would see that they are the ones who are truly arrogant in their assumption that they speak for others and not just for themselves. They cannot claim to speak on behalf of The People because they do not know what the people think.

As a columnist for the last 19 years, I have made it clear that my opinion is my own. I have never sought to back it up by referring to The People, even when I have known – through surveys rather than mere haphazard guesswork – that tens of thousands of people think exactly as I do, but silently. Indeed, I have no doubt that the only reason I am still writing a column today, when so many other columnists have come and gone, is precisely because mine are common views. Yet they remain my views, and I never attempt to bolster them by claiming to speak on behalf of anyone else.

Those who are now referring to The People in their protests and their objections to the Piano plan do so for one reason alone: they lack the guts to own their own opinions. They must bring in backing in the form of The People, like those children in the playground drawing reinforcements for a stand-off.

By hiding behind their organisations and The People, the foot-soldiers and officers of the Arrogant Army reveal themselves to be perfectly gutless. Maltese social culture is very much prone to cliquey and ‘group’ behaviour and fears the individual, and nowhere is this more apparent at present than in this obsessive reference to The People.

And then, of course, there is the logical fallacy in their argument: if enough people say something, then it must be right, and Renzo Piano or the prime minister must listen. There is no such thing as intrinsic truth or value. Hence, if The People and their chattering-class colonels think that Piano is just another architect and his plans are ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, then this is the truth which the prime minister and his chosen architect must heed.

For all their pretensions to high culture, the Arrogant Army don’t seem to understand the fatal flaw in their reasoning. It is akin to saying that if The People decree one of those Hamrun paintings of a boy in a red velvet suit to be much better than a Paul Klee, then our museum, given a choice between the two, should acquire a Hamrun painting of a boy in a red velvet suit and not a Paul Klee – because The People are paying for it and so they must decide.

Over the last 25 years, these islands have gone from almost no democracy to what appears to be the opposite extreme in which Joe Borg’s views on architecture are as valid and significant as those of Renzo Piano. It is this which offends me and not any opposition to the project as such. It seems to be democracy, but it is its polar opposite. It is a variation on the totalitarian communist theme that one person is as good and as entirely dispensable as another, hence surgeons and street-sweepers should have equal pay.

I must say that rather than causing me to perceive the government as arrogant, its choice of one of the greatest architects of all time for the Valletta project has reminded me why, given a choice between Nationalist and Labour, I find the former so very much more attractive. The Nationalist Party chooses Renzo Piano and builds its vision on the long-term. Meanwhile, the Labour Party talks about listening to The People and tailor-making a project according to The People’s suggestions.

What can I say? Thank heavens the Valletta project isn’t in the hands of Joseph Muscat, Anglu Farrugia, Toni Abela and Jason Micallef, because it would be an essay in hopeless, hapless amateurishness.

I rather suspect that the reason the prime minister is so keen to wrap it up within four years has only partly to do with electoral kudos, and is mainly to do with fear that incoming bunglers will faff it up. I’m with him on this, and unlike the Arrogant Army, I’m not drawing in The People to back me up.

Daphne Caruana Galizia’s website is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com