Marie Louise Coleiro Preca: “But I never go to the illegal bits.”

I am about to give up hope that anything will ever change. The problem here is quite clearly cultural. Just look at the head of state’s reasoning in this interview she gave to The Malta Independent on Sunday.

‘You go to events at the Montekristo Estate’.

‘But I never go to the illegal bits.’

‘You attend and endorse fundraisers by the Malta Developers Association, at the Montekristo Estate.’

‘But it isn’t my office which organises them. I just turn up and get the money.’

Those are not precise quotes, but they are exact précis.

I have no doubt that Marie Louise Coleiro Preca actually does reason this way and is not just pretending for the sake of self-justification. After all, she is a lifelong Mintoffian and Malta Labour Party member, politician and activist and was secretary-general of the MLP during its worst years. So her standards of behaviour are not those you would expect – or rather, they are.

The problem is that she is not alone or unique or even in a minority. She reasons like what I have come to realise is the vast majority of Maltese people.

“If it’s not actually illegal, then it’s acceptable.”

“If I have a nagging feeling that something is not quite right but I can’t quite put my finger on why it is wrong, nor articulate it, and everybody else seems to think differently, then the problem must be mine so I’ll just change my thinking.”

Some weeks ago I broke the news that Michelle Muscat’s parents’ prolonged residential care at Villa Messina was not being generously funded by the prime minister, their son-in-law (they have no means of their own), but by public money, and that post March 2013 Mr and Mrs Tanti had been put into a government-funded programme designed to help the destitute and incapacitated who had been abandoned by their families and for whom there was no immediately available place at a state care home.

Basically, the programme – the government paying for places for people at expensive private care homes – is intended to deal with the problem of elderly people who are abandoned at the state general hospital.

That the prime minister, immediately he was in a position of power, used the programme to put his wife’s parents into expensive care at Villa Messina at a tremendous cost to the public purse is immensely abusive. Nobody should need an explanation as to why and how it is abusive and would be considered a resignation matter in more civilised parts of the globe.

But a few days later I found myself in conversation with a group of people and the subject came up. One woman, who appeared to have understood nothing or was just pretending not to because her family’s business empire has gained a great deal since March 2013, said: “Well, it’s wrong if the prime minister got them onto the care programme abusively, but if they applied and were accepted then it’s fine.”

These are the prime minister’s parents-in-law we are talking about. There is no way on earth they could have got residential care at Villa Messina, paid by the government, any way other than abusively.

Malta’s ongoing tragedy – the tragedy that has given us the government we have now and will probably get to keep until somebody finds a Maltese clock in Edward Scicluna’s drawing-room and everybody suddenly discovers scruples – is that these things have to be pointed out and explained.

Stop and think. Would David Cameron use an emergency government programme to put Mrs Cameron’s parents into very expensive private residential care with the bill picked up by the British taxpayer? The very thought cannot be countenanced. This is not necessarily because Cameron is a better person, but because he knows what the acceptable standards of behaviour are, and even if he is tempted to do it (unlikely), he won’t.

Not even the sleazy and money-grubbing Tony Blair would have done something like that – not because he is decent and correct but because he would have been eaten alive by his electorate for doing it, led by a ferocious press.