Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a different social milieu, a different culture, or even just a parallel universe, but where I come from an apology involves three essential elements: an expression of regret, an admission of error or guilt, and the words “sorry” and “forgiveness”. Sometimes, it even involves the words “deeply” and “sincerely”.

That is why I cannot understand why the Leader of the Opposition’s single sentence – “Black Monday should never have happened” – has been interpreted as an apology for the hideous events of 15 October 1979.

“Black Monday should never have happened” is not an apology but a statement of fact. For a start – and this should be obvious – apologies are made in the first person, singular or plural. Just in case there is room for misunderstanding here, I’ll give an example.

I borrow my brother’s car, drive carelessly and hit a wall, causing a great deal of damage. I ring my brother to make sure he is home, then I go there and I say, to his face: “I am deeply ashamed to tell you that I have wrecked your car by driving it into a wall. I really am most terribly sorry. I hope you will forgive me.”

I do not go to a bar and, hoping that someone there will overhear me and relay the news to my brother, say in a loud voice: “My brother’s car should not have been wrecked.” In no way can this be defined as an apology.

Whatever we think of Joseph Muscat, and however low the regard may be in which we hold him, there cannot be a single one among us who imagined that he thinks Black Monday should have happened. He did not need to tell us that breaking and entering, theft, arson, vandalism, GBH, and imperilling human life are criminal acts at law (and he didn’t even do that) because the law is there and we know what it says. Still less did he need to tell us that those criminal acts should not have happened. We know they shouldn’t have happened, because we are civilised. That they shouldn’t have happened is not a subjective opinion depending on one’s political standpoint. It is an absolute fact.

Even the word “happened” is most offensive. Criminal acts do not happen. They are perpetrated, by people. Storms happen. Earthquakes happen. Floods happen. But crime doesn’t “happen”. It is the result of deliberate human action. Arson is not the result of spontaneous combustion, but the decision taken by some people to set a fire in a building – and in this particular case, one in which several people are still trapped inside.

I am appalled that Malta’s future prime minister finds it necessary to reassure us that he, too, is civilised and like all other civilised people he does not approve of arson, GBH, attempts to suppress freedom of speech, and the ransacking of politicians” homes by politically-motivated thugs. How are we supposed to react to his idiotic declaration – by sighing with relief because the man who would be prime minister thinks it’s wrong to set fire to office buildings with employees still inside?

What am I saying – the equivocator didn’t say it was wrong. He said it should never have happened. That’s not at all the same thing. I take the ferry to Gozo. It sinks. I tell myself “I should never have taken this ferry, because look what happened to me.” That’s the spirit in which Joseph Muscat said what he did during– oh blissful irony – a speech at the Tumas Fenech Foundation for Education in Journalism. Black Monday should never have happened because the Labour Party suffered grave consequences and the Nationalist Party benefited.

Muscat’s was not an apology, but an insult – the trivialising of criminal acts and serious wrongs. One of his elves described it on the Internet as “an honourable statement”, but the elves – most of whom appear to have had few of the privileges of a decent upbringing – can be forgiven for not knowing what they do (or think). To anyone else, it is an utterly dishonourable statement, one so disturbing in its complacency and intimations of amorality that it provoked one of the victims of that day, Eddie Fenech Adami, to break his self-imposed post-presidential silence and speak to the press.

He didn’t even participate in The Times’ video of interviews and memories. His wife did so alone. Yet after Muscat said what he did, and even had the gag-inducing nerve to describe his words as a “historic apology” – imagine that, calling your own words historic – Fenech Adami said on Friday: “No one from the Labour Party has ever apologised to me for the pain caused to my family that day. Dom Mintoff even accused me of provocation. Dr Muscat’s statement was not the apology I was expecting.”

Muscat left me with the impression that it is not the arson, violence, vandalism and theft of that day which he regrets so much as the consequences for the Labour Party. As former Nationalist minister Michael Falzon told the newspapers: “He tried to give the impression that the perpetrators used the Labour Party for their own ends. But in reality, it was the Labour government which used those thugs to its own ends.”

Muscat will never apologise. Commonsense should tell us that. He was raised in a family of Mintoffjani who managed to come to terms with the events of Black Monday sufficiently to vote for Mintoff again a mere two years later. An apology for Black Monday would be a rejection not only of the man he was brought up to worship as s-Salvatore ta’ Malta. More crucially, it would be a rejection of his family’s views, attitudes and political beliefs, and few can reject their formative origins without undermining their very sense of self.

To apologise for Black Monday, Joseph Muscat would first have to reinterpret his own personal history. He didn’t mind doing that with EU membership, but when it comes to his own childhood and growing-up identity as a Mintoffjan, it’s a different matter.

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