“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” Angela Merkel said yesterday morning, ahead of last night’s ‘crunch summit’ which aims to resolve the crisis and help bring about confidence in the eurozone.

As we faff around nagging about the bus service, while Jeffrey, Franco and Jesmond stamp their little feet as though they’re living in Lilliput somewhere in the South Seas in the 18th century – do they realise how cut off from reality they seem? – Europe as we know it may well collapse around us and on top of us, leaving us even worse off than where we started.

We have become accustomed to the reality of a united Europe. Even when we were not part of it, this was all we knew. Our generation grew up thinking the very idea of war and enmity in western Europe – for we were children of the Cold War and made that clear division – as completely laughable. When my grandmother told me that she would be voting Yes in the EU referendum because she didn’t want anyone ever to have to go through what her generation went through twice in terms of war, I thought it was the funniest and oddest of reasons. It hadn’t occurred to me that to somebody who lived through the two worst and most destructive wars in history, that would be an ever-present lurking danger.

The European Union was born out of that last Great War, giving us the peace and democracy we have taken for granted for the last 60 years or so. Taken for granted after a fashion, that is, because until late 1989, with communism keeping half of Europe in a dead vice, we grew up and lived beneath the shadow of a nuclear war that could wreak far greater devastation than the two world wars put together.

Now the eurozone is in the grip of the most terrible crisis and if it is not resolved, the entire bloc will go down with it. Put into this context, the magnificent immaturity displayed by certain members of the house, not least the leader of the Opposition who has shown more concern for the fate of his emails than for the fate of the eurozone, is impressive.

In the face of economic bewilderment and with unemployment on the rise and rise, the inevitable has happened. Right-wing parties, including the Far Right, are seeing a resurgence of popularity right across the European Union, including in Malta where the right-wing, conservative and xenophobic Labour Party, with its flashes of national socialism, is attracting those who are afraid of the future but who mistakenly think of themselves as liberal.

The problems with the euro have gone on for around two years now, but the present situation is ‘do or die’. Spain has 40% unemployment among young people. Italy is piloted by a pervert distracted by his own myriad problems with the law. Britain’s coalition government has been hit by a massive parliamentary attempt to force a referendum on whether the country should stay in the union. Sweden has backtracked on discussions to join the eurozone. And back home on the ranch, Malta has been given a set of problems it really doesn’t need as one junior backbencher threatens to bring down the government if the prime minister and the Nationalist Party executive don’t go into repeated huddles to talk about how important he is and how he must be mollified. The very worst thing about Franco Debono right now is that he is distracting the government from dealing with the real problems, the problems which directly affect Malta, by turning himself into an immediate problem that has to be got out of the way before anybody can proceed. If Franco Debono thinks he is being smart by giving us the imminent possibility of leadership by Joseph Muscat through the worst European crisis of our lifetime, then he should be locked into a straitjacket alongside Jeffrey.

The greatest threat now is that the euro crisis might cause a real rift between those EU states in the eurozone and those outside it: the ‘ins’ (17 states) and the ‘outs’ (10 states). Adversity can either bring you together or crack you apart, and in this case it has brought the eurozone states closer together but apart from the others. And the others don’t like it. “There is a danger... that as this eurozone coming together happens, there is a risk that those countries outside the euro... might see the eurozone members starting to take decisions that affect the single market,” David Cameron said. Finland’s minister for Europe agreed. “There are only two options,” he said. “One: further integration. Or two: split up.”

In the darkness of this worrying situation, it is terribly distressing to see Malta distracted and held hostage by the extraordinary divorced-from-reality behaviour of three government backbenchers and the Leader of the Opposition.