No matter how much he may rub you the wrong way, you’ve just got to hand it to the man.

First he played these islands’ 400,000 citizens - the shades of meaning that word has now taken on - for consummate suckers, and now he’s well on his way to doing the same to the EU’s 400 million.

He palmed off on us his 170-page manifesto as his electoral programme, not finding room amid all that waffle to squeeze in a few more lines about the only major plank in his platform that would be underpinning his term of office if elected.

As many will no doubt be looking on in consternation, he and the present Tourism Minister (in the remote likelihood that he was in on the deal when he drew up the PL’s programme) will be laughing all the way to the (Central) Bank.

Maybe it was Dom Mintoff’s and Alfred Sant’s principles that rendered each of them blind to such low-hanging fruit. Seems they missed the trees for the wood.

A long-standing platitude of local politics has been that of making Malta a bridge between Europe and Africa. That idea has now been extrapolated to include all other continents and any tract of inhabited land in-between. 

Smack in the middle of the sea that is in the middle of this planet, we have now truly made this dime-sized outcrop of rock a focal point of sorts, and not for all the right reasons.

Yes, you’ve really got to hand it to the man. A few weeks into his term in office, and we had him pitching his polished sales talk about a permanent link to Gozo: a bridge or an undersea tunnel?

What we didn’t know then was that he had already applied the finishing touches to the secret tunnel (for at the time there was only an underground tunnel but no bridge. That came months later in a phone call from Sri Lanka) that would unite the rest of the world to Europe and divide these islands as never before since Mintoff’s monumental feud with Archbishop Gonzi.

Joe Genovese

Birkirkara