You have to wonder whether those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union – who now, apparently, include six ministers in David Cameron’s government – need to have their heads examined.

Cameron is correct in saying that Britain is safer all round in the European Union, not least in terms of the economy. But there are many who can’t see beyond the fact that Britain is a magnet for migrants. This blinds them to everything else. It is not only the third-country nationals to whom they object, the ones they see as flooding into Britain for social housing and social benefits. They also object to the citizens of other EU member states going there and ‘taking our jobs’. They see pulling Britain out of the European Union not just as a way of making the country far less attractive to people from the undemocratic countries of the world, but also as a way of keeping out the citizens of other member states – and that includes the Maltese, the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Danes and the Finns, the Greeks and the Spaniards who keep the economy going.

That’s not how they see it, though. They don’t see the people who go to Britain to work as keeping the economy going and thriving. They see them as people taking jobs meant for the British. I have heard people say that the trouble with the British mentality is that it has evolved over centuries, on an island, with an ‘invader complex’ (just like Malta). But that isn’t entirely correct. The Scots – the very people who were forced pletely for granted and decisions are built around it. Because of the language and the fact that Britain and British culture are completely familiar to us from the media and experience – London, not Rome, remains the traditional spiritual capital of post-colonial Malta – Britain remains the single EU member state to which most Maltese citizens who move out are moving. If Britain pulls out, it will not just have disastrous consequences for Britain, but also extremely difficult consequences for Malta.

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Prime Minister Muscat’s tweeting of a snap of the menu from the summit dinner, while the dinner was in progress, has not been well received. It was even less well received when a photograph of part of the dinner table, tweeted by a communications aide to another prime minister, revealed Muscat to be sitting at table sans his jacket, in his shirt-sleeves. I don’t think he does this kind of this out of ignorance, but deliberately. It is his way of behaving insultingly, of disparaging his surroundings and the context. He believes it makes him look cool and unconcerned. And I think all of this has its roots in something he said to an interviewer many years ago, when he was still working on the Labour Party’s news portal, Maltastar. He was at a smart restaurant, he said, and an important and rich businessman came in, wearing a tracksuit. He was very impressed. He realised, he said, that people with money and power can wear what they like, and don’t have to wear smart clothes when it is expected of them.

I remember reading that and thinking that the rich businessman was definitely a chav, and that Muscat of Maltastar couldn’t tell the difference because he is somebody who equates social class and status only to wealth or the lack of it. I also thought to myself how Muscat failed to understand something that those who are raised in a different context understand instinctively: that the hallmark of true status (to use a word he will be familiar with) means knowing what the appropriate dress is for any occasion, and then making a point of wearing it. It’s part of good manners, like not wiping your hands on the table-cloth just because you can.

What he fails to understand, too, is that every seemingly insignificant thing he does like this is not insignificant at all. People notice, the incidents accumulate, and they add up to a gathering irritation with him.