Part of the rewriting of fairly recent Maltese history by the Partit Bla Isem and its camp-followers is that people like Alex Sceberras Trigona, Karmenu Vella and Leo Brincat were great democrats. And so was Joe Grima, a man most people my age and older remember vividly for his banging and bellowing on trucks next to that other beautiful mind, Dom Mintoff

The man we all called AST (many of us probably do so still) had a piece published in The Times yesterday, by means of which he sought to propagate this urban legend. He took the Prime Minister to task for continuing to govern when “he has lost his command of a majority of seats in parliament”.

Aside from the numerical untruth of this declaration, and the fact that the government’s support can be gauged only by means of a vote in the House in a situation like this (Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando resigned the whip but did not relinquish support for the government), Sceberras Trigona is quite brazen. For five and a half years, between 1981 and 1987, he was part of a government – as its foreign minister – formed on the basis of the majority of seats but the minority of votes. Yes, when Alex Sceberras Trigona’s party formed the government in 1981, more people had voted for Eddie Fenech Adami’s Nationalist Party, but due to a fluke in the system, Mintoff’s awful party got more seats.

I don’t remember AST objecting then. No, not at all – on the contrary, he absolutely loved it. He dashed about in his huge ministerial limo with his unofficial minders, threw his weight about, struck secret deals with Kim Il Sung’s North Korea and with Muammar Gaddafi (then a terrorist and international pariah) and had a jolly nice time which he is mourning still.

One of my abiding personal memories of AST the foreign minister is watching him standing in the doorway of his ministerial office in Merchants Street, surrounded by a protective layer of thugs, as some friends and I walked past the building in a protest demo. The thugs who rushed at us with lengths of steel chain-threaded through rubber piping emerged from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He saw them, and I saw him seeing them, before post office workers in the building across the street pulled me to safety and slammed the Post Office door closed against attack.

So, unlike the younger people who wrote the Nationalist Party’s statement in response to AST’s article, I find it difficult to convey any level of astonishment at his behaviour, because I don’t feel any. Nothing the man does is going to surprise me. I had the real thing as a cabinet minister between the 1970s and 1980s when, because he had been there for most of my life that far, he seemed like a permanent awful fixture who would never go away. And he never did go away, did he?

“Malta now has an undemocratic government”, Sceberras Trigona wrote. Hardly that, Alex. As a Mintoff and KMB man, an avid supporter of Gaddafi and Kim Il Sung, a signer of secret treaties for North Korean weapons to be used against the citizens of your own country, and a signature fixture of three abusive, violent and corrupt governments between 1971 and 1987, you just can’t be taken seriously when you speak about democracy or accuse others of not being democratic.

Alex, you should have retired gracefully in May 1987, but given that nothing about you or your behaviour was graceful before that, it was too much to expect. You have done enough harm already. Now kindly step aside and allow fresh harm to be done by fresher faces. I don’t think any of those of us whose lives were blighted by you and yours for 16 interminable years really want to be looking at you again anytime soon. Please, just go away.

***

Malta is awash with restoration projects, including a rather extensive one on the building that will, within a few short months, be Joseph Muscat’s office and the nerve centre of his Gvern Bla Isem.

Does the Partit Bla Isem ever make any approving noises? No, it doesn’t. But now that the bronze statue of Manwel Dimech, which stands in Castile Place, has been given a good going-over of the right sort, the Partit Bla Isem has issued forth to “welcome” the move. Of course, there is a qualifier to this welcome, and certainly no congratulations for a job well done. Toni Abela, one of the party’s two deputy leaders and libel lawyer to Malta Today (he’s also something of an expert in rubber puppets, but enough of that) told the press that the government only cleaned up the statue after Labour threatened to do the job itself and submitted a permit application to Mepa.

Quite frankly, I don’t blame the relevant restoration body – whichever it is – for panicking and rushing to get the work done before Labour did it. I’m trying to picture Toni Abela’s idea of an ace restoration job: stil rustiku, perhaps, with some stone cladding round the base, and the inevitable ostentatious claim, engraved in brass or marble, that the Labour Party did the work.