Two news items which followed each other in quick succession have sent shock waves down the collective spine of the general public.

We celebrated the choice of Valletta as the capital city of culture for 2018 and the first shock came.

Jason Micallef, the former Secretary General of the Labour Party who has been appointed to the V18 committee, said over the weekend that Valletta is well-known for its culture, such as, wait for it, its football team, its festas, etc.

The mind boggles: Is this what Mr Micallef considers as culture? Is this that is going to be Valletta’s cultural contribution to Europe? And are we going to try and get people to come to Malta to watch Valletta FC play or attend the Valletta festas?

Hardly had the local population time to absorb this body blow, then a second quickly joined it.

The government is negotiating getting the trashy and tatty Monti from the area at the back of the Palace to Ordnance Street, spilling over to the Piano City Gate project. It was stated in Parliament on Monday evening that there was a written commitment signed during the electoral campaign committing the Labour government to this.

So we will once again have at the entrance to the city an abomination as bad as that which we find today just outside the City Gate; aluminium kiosks of dubious legality spilling over to the passage way and crowding pedestrians on their way into the city. Now, if the current negotiations bear fruit, we will have, inside the city a replica of what we find outside it at present.

Again, this will be the government’s contribution to V18. Malta will be the capital city of Europe but only a trashy, tatty, bedraggled one. Malta’s name and honour will be dragged in the mud just as the former Labour administration of 1996 celebrated a Capital City of Culture with all Republic Street dug up and impassable, earning us all negative comments on the international press.

One would have thought that with a 37,000 record majority, the Labour government could backpedal on commitments, but now that we know the commitments were written down and signed, there does not seem to be any way the government could renege.

The Monti owners were indeed up in arms against the PN government and specifically Austin Gatt for pushing them all the way down Merchants Street to the back of the Presidential Palace. They marshaled their votes and traded them for a clear commitment by the Labour Party.

And this brings us to ask: Who decides things in Malta? We are under no illusion that it is the people who decide things by their majority. On the contrary, in this case, it is the Monti people who decide how Valletta should look and what face it offers to the visitors in years to come.

The Monti people do not offer any Malta crafts but towels and underwear made in China, and whose blaring music many times is drowned out by raucous shouting, if not a choice Maltese swearword or two. But they are the arbiters of taste for the capital city, ‘built by gentlemen for gentlemen’.

Piano’s Pompidou Centre is almost next door to Les Halles and its market. Here in Malta, Piano’s masterpiece will be sited next to il-Monti.