Events of the past few weeks - or should we say those of the past 20 months? - have been a salutary lesson as to why politicians and other holders of high office should stick to better and stricter standards of behaviour than the rest of us.

There was the brief temptation for a moment back there to go with the flow in thinking that politicians are just some more human beings and that in behaving like everybody else they are truly representative of those who elect them. But we know now through having several unsavoury situations forced on us that this is not the way it should be. Politicians need to adhere to higher standards than those who elect them for the simple reason that they are in authority, are paid with public money, make laws, are there to set a good example, and need our respect. We don't want our politicians to be like us, still less worse than us. We want them to be better.

In our heart of hearts, we all know this.  Many struggle to rationalise things.  Many men cheat, many marriages end up in the divorce courts, all sorts of people drink, fool around, take things too far and then get themselves back together. But, you can see that many people don't really believe it. They would much rather not have to defend such situations and they would much rather that people in public office were boringly normal and not beset by extra-curricular activities and difficulties.

The reality is that there seems to be a preponderance of these problems. The impression people are receiving out here is that a small crowd of very hungry people have rammed down the door to the sweet-shop and are currently cramming their mouths until they feel sick, regurgitating it all then cramming some more until they are lying bloated all over the shop-floor. The greed is palpable. People grabbing jobs that they are unfit to do; others having jobs created for them where no such job existed before and where it most definitely is not necessary; people being driven around by chauffeurs in cars paid for by the state, with those chauffeurs and cars waiting outside bars while they drink inside in the evening after work, that is, if they have done any work at all; delegations of government people and their hangers-on flying to and from China, hither and thither on the merest pretext; and the arrogance, oh the arrogance.

Suddenly, we have a new form of royalty, a class of people who believe that they are accountable to nobody because their political bosses were voted in with a 36,000 majority which they somehow believe to be permanent. One is property speculator Sandro Chetcuti, who is now swaggering around as though he has the entire government - or at least, the bits of it which count - in his pocket. On which basis does anyone get to dictate what becomes of an entire stretch of Malta's coastline which is largely made up of public land? 'Costa Chetcuti' - the new Gold Coast of concrete riches, and a further death knell to what is left of arable Malta.  A few years back, the mere prospect of any such thing would have had the environmental campaigners drawing out the crowds to march in the streets.

Now, we have a few press statements which are lost in the crush of a hundred other stories. Remember Astrid Vella with her megaphone, leading the march (with, if I recall correctly, Labour Party secretary-general Jason Micallef) on a farmhouse in Fawwara or Bahrija, which Victor Scerri, then president of the Nationalist Party, planned to restore? There were placards, chanting and much concern about freshwater crabs, and the media coverage was, to quote our energy minister, phenomenal. That was for one farmhouse. Now, an entire stretch of undeveloped coast is going to be covered with hotels, restaurants, bars and beach-clubs, and a promenade running the length of it all, and Astrid Vella and her megaphone are invisible, Jason Micallef is still politically motivated, and people have fallen into coping mode as they tend to do whenever they inflict a Labour government on the country or have it inflicted on them.