Four years ago I was invited to write a fortnightly column for this august publication. I was told that my continual globetrotting and interest in world affairs would bring a new and different dimension to the paper and one that was needed as, while world news was covered, comment on the world political scene was not as a matter of course and so would be of great interest.

Moreover, it was pointed out that, while the occasional comment on Malta and the Maltese political scene was acceptable, it should not be very controversial as the citizens of the rock would be resentful of a foreigner, especially a man of British Empire descent, being critical. My great-great-great-uncle was Cecil Rhodes of Rhodesia fame so a chap like me, living in Mdina and daring to criticise the island or its leaders, might be misunderstood as having a British colonial superiority complex.

I accepted what I had been told and set about my brief. However, experience soon taught me that the first point was nonsense. The Maltese people are extremely decent, religious, pleasant and likeable. However, they are completely insular and make both the Japanese and British look most cosmopolitan by comparison. Their interest in foreign affairs tends to stop after they know the Manchester United or Inter Milan football result. Moreover, their dislike of Gozitans easily outweighs their distaste of men like Robert Mugabe, whose atrocities they see as having no bearing on them.

However, the second point was totally correct. The Maltese people don’t really like foreigners to have opinions on Malta – even if they agree with those expressed. The Maltese really are just interested in Malta and they don’t like foreigners coming here and giving them anything but praise or their foreign currency – and that’s all there is to that.

By way of example, I was at a marvellous dinner party a few years ago in Valletta. Over coffee I made an occasional critical observation of the inadequate and oft unprofessional way the Maltese dealt with the tourist industry. A very angry woman at the other end of the table said that, as I wasn’t Maltese, I had no right to make such comments.

“Oh but I have,” I said, “I have just as much right as you. We are both citizens of the EU and enjoy freedom of movement, work and residence as a result. You joined to get your roads fixed; you failed to get that but got me instead. It’s your bad lucky really I suppose.” Or is it?

Personally, I think, especially looking at the state of the roads over five years later, that people like me are a better product of EU membership than poor roads and, indeed, are a very valuable import because there is a large world out there and Malta is but a delightful little speck on its face.

A small island led by an even smaller controlling class becomes complacent, introspective and dull. It has therefore a need for the constant stimulation of outside ideas and criticism and being in the EU has provided some of that need.

So, as I write my last article for you, I ask myself if I have succeeded in capturing your imagination and enthusiasm over the last four years? I’m afraid that my articles about the world beyond Malta have largely been met by the polite agreement of the vaguest interest. This could be of course because I am a hopelessly boring writer or it might be that most Maltese people tend to have but the faintest interest in what happens elsewhere – even in neighbouring Libya. There is nothing new about this tendency in an island race and I suppose the smaller the island the more acute the introspection might become.

By and large, controversial opinions or extraordinary predictions about world affairs have been read with the sort of mild interest that Bertie Wooster might have shown in getting a job as a young man of inherited wealth in the economically recessed 1930s.

I had quickly realised that serious international stories seemed deadly dull to the readership as they sipped their Sunday morning coffee. So I rightly labelled Tony Blair a liar and a crook who probably had had his nervous system removed at birth. I described his wife as a hypocrite and a fat dollop of emotional lard. I explained that she had been brought up in a totally dysfunctional environment that only served to make her a champagne socialist of extraordinary greed. Together they made a couple who could compare with the vilest in any Charles Dickens book. So who cares and who is Uriah Heap anyway was the re-action.

I predicted, correctly, that the newly elected President Sarkozy’s marriage would not last more than two months after his election and that he was a vain midget in his Cuban heeled boots. I told the readers he would marry the beautiful but talentless Ms. Carla Bruni before it was common knowledge and pointed out, rightly, he would, nevertheless, become an extremely unpopular President of France. I was not only right but ahead of the pack – but so what thought the readers, France has nothing to do with us.

I made case after case that Vladimir Putin was little more than a murderous dwarf – naming his victims and pointing out that they tended to be anyone who challenged him politically and that they came to a swift and nasty little end as a result. I warned that he might have embraced capitalism but never would indulge democracy and had no conception of human rights – other than his own.

I warned as long ago as 2007 that the recovery of economic power, mainly caused by mineral wealth, would give rise to Russia rediscovering imperialism and it did. I rejoiced that one silver lining of the world recession would be that Russia would be forced to postpone its planned bullying of smaller neighbours and again it came to pass. Nothing to do with Malta the empty e-mail box from readers told me.

I predicted the world recession and correctly explained why it would happen in 2007 − over six months before world leaders acknowledged that they thought that there might be ‘an economic slowdown’. World economics might be of interest to him – but any recession won’t affect us was the reaction from the paper’s supporters.

I explained how the once Great Britain had been reduced, by years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to a place of indiscipline and violence where street assault and even murder were becoming increasingly common. A place where the rule of law was only expected to be respected by the middle classes who should be punished to the maximum for the most minor of offences while white, black or Asian thugs from police-no-go housing estates, expected to be able to get away with knife or gun violence. They believed this on the strength that they knew that the silly red brick university 1960s socialists, who now ran the UK, thought that the thugs were really the victims of their own crimes because they probably came from broken homes.

I sounded the alarm – Britain’s real victims were the old, the sick and the poor that these thugs preyed upon. I pondered if the New Labour government was more corrupt than it was stupid and incompetent. I might as well have been talking of life on Mars. There might be a little problem along Britain’s lines down in lower Valletta but nowhere else on the island – so who gives a shit was the reaction.

I predicted that Barrack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination, would go on to win the presidential election but that that would be the summit of his career. His oratory would get him the job but his dithering inability would lose him it after one term. And I expect to be right about that as well. However, although Obama is generally liked in Malta, nobody bothered to contradict me.

My other condemnations of countries like Zimbabwe, China, North Korea and Iran were met with the same mild curiosity. A bit like the vague interest a bored boy at the back of a class might show when history is the subject.

My reported visits all over the world to places like Oman, Dubai, Moscow, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Egypt, New York, Mumbai, Delhi, Jodhpur, Morocco, Singapore, Tunisia, South Africa and the whole of Europe appeared to be of little interest despite many harrowing reports of poverty, child abuse, mob violence, police brutality and government corruption.

So am I complaining about not being appreciated for my knowledge and arrogantly frank predictions and opinions? No, I am not. Actually, I am only too aware that I’m not always right and, anyway, people are entitled to different opinions to those expressed by me.

My sadness is that the vast majority of Maltese readers don’t seem to care enough to even have an opinion on world issues let alone express one. So letters to the editor either praising me or demanding my removal were few and far between on international matters.

However, when I turned my guns on anything to do with these islands suddenly the editor was flooded with complaints and I would log on on a Monday morning to receive pages of e-mails either of congratulations or bitter anger and occasional abuse.

Whether it was my complaints about government corruption, the appalling lack of Mepa control over the construction industry, the dirty state of the island, the poor management of Air Malta or the mismanagement of the tourist industry in general – the people responded enthusiastically by expressing their opinions – either in support or against.

My ridiculing of the Prime Minister’s frequent claim that Malta would be the number one tourist destination in the Mediterranean by 2015 attracted a lot of comment. A joke about a local woman thinking that the supermarket Arcadia was owned by bin Laden had Noel Grima searching Europe until he tracked me down in Rome in order that I might pour oil on troubled waters. My questioning how the annual restaurant awards on the island were really judged infuriated many people – mainly those who had won them.

My criticism of institutional racism and sexism caused much controversy. My defence of Svetlana Podgorska and others against police racism, sexism and gross stupidity had people applauding whereas my statement that Dr Sant had every right to wear a wig did not – well in certain quarters anyway. However, those who did agree with me on that were the very same people who complained that my poking fun at the dreadful Dom Mintoff was disgraceful and appallingly disrespectful.

Moreover, I received much correspondence from people criticising me for being positive and supporting the government’s handling of the recession; for applauding Dr Joe Bannister and all at the MSFA for their work; and the many other excellent ideas or schemes designed to bring work and prosperity to the island. Sucking up to Gonzi was the way one reader put it.

The point is that whatever I wrote about the world interested very few however controversial my opinion was. Whereas, whatever I wrote about Malta, however trivial the subject, gave rise to much interest and comment.

The same writer, the same readers but different reactions. The facts speak for themselves. In Malta, the outside world is of little interest and that’s all there is to that.

However, I finish this final article with the huge self-indulgence of saying how I continue to adore the island, the people and living in my home in Mdina. I am very glad that I settled here. Thank you all for making me so welcome.

Whatever I have written about the government and the people over these four years, whether you agreed with it or it infuriated you, my opinion was expressed because I care about this beautiful introspective mad house.

And I will come out of retirement to expose future cases of corruption, racism or sexism. You know where I am.

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