Regrettably, I was unable to attend the Chesterton Conference held by the GK Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture at the University of Malta on 15 May. I particularly wished to have been there to add to the special tribute that was made to my very old and greatly missed friend John Micallef, who wrote a column for several years in The Sunday Times of Malta under the pseudonym of “Roamer.”

John and I had known each other from childhood. We were in the same form at St Edward’s College for 10 years from the age of seven, were at Sandhurst together, and then served in the Royal Malta Artillery for several years before my departure for London and his leaving the Army. We kept in touch and became close again on my return to Malta 16 years ago.

John was an intrinsically good, kind and generous person, the son of a journalist and newspaper editor, who found his own metier in journalism. He was highly intelligent and extremely well read. He wrote the most beautiful, lucid, rather baroque, English. Increasingly, as he grew older, he was convinced of the exclusive righteousness of his Catholic faith and the political supremacy of the Nationalist Party in Malta, and his loyalty to these two causes tended to dominate his writings.

John and I had our differences in the last two years of his life, which we aired in public and didn’t manage to settle in private, as we should have. Our friendship should have been more important than our disagreements. I shall regret our estrangement for the rest of my life.

It would be hypocritical of me to say I admire Chesterton. On the contrary, while I like his writing, which is entertaining, witty and superb, his view of the world repels me. He was a journalist all his life and published some 4,000 articles in the course of about 30 years. His intellect and writings were truly prodigious and his two novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday, and the Father Brown detective stories were brilliant. But his non-fiction, particularly his religious works written both before and after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, leave me cold.

I part company, therefore, with those who are fans of Chesterton in essence because he was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause solely of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life (he died in 1936), every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic Church over the Protestant or any other faith. Such zealotry permeated everything he wrote.

Chesterton was determined to fight against godless scepticism. He was convinced that the unquestioning acceptance of Catholic dogma was the only refuge from the terrors of free thought: “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out”. He went on repeating this all his life in various permutations. He was convinced of the need to be told what he should believe.

Doubt was inexcusable. It was “frantic and blasphemous” to say “I may be wrong”. In his view the Roman Catholic Church – in what some rather grandly refer to as “the Magisterium” − teaches us what is right, and we all have to accept it. Free thought, he argued, is freedom from thought. An open mind, he insisted, “is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth”. To become a Catholic is “to learn how to think”. He saw the Britain of his day as a pagan plutocracy, ruined by the Reformation.

Chesterton refused to believe in the idea of progress. He held the theology of St Thomas Aquinas in higher regard than the science of Darwin or the philosophy of Marx or Nietzsche. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc, he opposed social reforms such as the ground-breaking National Insurance Act of 1911 in the UK on the grounds that the state had no right to encroach on the independence of the poor. Legislation aimed to make divorce accessible was another “insult” to the poor, because they “believed in marital fidelity”.

However, his objections to the power of the state were removed if the state was Roman Catholic. In Rome, in 1929, he had a friendly audience with Mussolini and, while watching a forest of hands raised in the fascist salute, he felt he realised at last that Italy had recovered “an ancient human passion for many centuries − the passion of order”, a sentiment with which Hitler also agreed. Dying in 1936, he lived just long enough to see, with dismay, what fascism really meant.

He also took a firm line on the rights of women. They should not, he insisted, go out to work. They were happier at home, where they had time for “hobbies”. Nor should they be allowed to vote. Any true woman would consider it unwomanly. As for birth control, it was simply a conspiracy on the part of rich businessmen to prevent the poor having large families in case they should start demanding higher wages.

Naturally, his opinion of other religions was unfavourable. He considered Islam inherently “barbaric” and the essential fact about Jews, for Chesterton, was that they did not belong in the country where they lived. They should be separated from the native population and obliged to congregate in self-governing enclaves with “special laws and exemptions”. Any Jew who aspired to political or social prominence “must be dressed like an Arab” to make it clear he was a foreigner.

No doubt, the views of Chesterton I have just set out above will find resonance with a certain kind of Maltese Catholic. I can imagine that the equivalent here of “Angry of Tunbridge Wells,” the superannuated “Angry of Ta’ Xbiex,” and others of his ilk in Malta, would take great comfort from such reactionary views expressed in such beautiful language as Chesterton was able to command.

But you can also see, perhaps, why I believe such a retrogressive view of social issues – even allowing for the times in which Chesterton was writing when such ideas were rife – such misogynism, anti-Semitism, contempt for the poor working class in society, and rigid and out-dated traditionalism are totally unacceptable in a modern pluralistic society, no matter how beautifully expressed. I am happy to read excellent prose in journalism, but I also look for wisdom and good judgment. That is the test of any journalist worth his salt.

Chesterton was beyond doubt a most skilled polemicist but, regrettably, he tried to convey some truly nasty and unsavoury ideas.