Guests left without food or drinks for two and a half hours until Joseph and Michelle Muscat turned up

After posting about how the Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat turned up turned up to the CHOGM Business Forum dinner two and a half hours after their guests, something occurred to me.

Those guests will have been left without food or drink for the entire duration of those two and a half hours, because convention dictates that nothing is served unless the hosts and the guests of honour (in this case, there were no guests of honour) are present.

The first convention is never tested, because it is completely unheard of for the hosts to arrive after their guests, let alone two and a half hours after their guests. But the rule will have had to be adhered to all the same unless the caterers received instructions to the contrary and the prime minister delegated somebody to stand in for him.

I rang a couple of people who were there to find out. And sure enough: service did not begin before the Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat arrived. The appalling treatment of those guests by their hosts cannot be overstated. Of course, it goes without saying that they should have left, but in those situations a strange kind of stressful ‘prisoner sensation’ takes over, in which people feel abused by how they are treated but at the same time feel unable to leave.