PM’s special envoy wants you to know that he is not a sheep

Repeat after him: Joe Grima is not a sheep. You definitely are, Mr Grima. A Labour sheep.

Times change, the context changes, the world spins, the Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall is breached, your dictator and despot friends are shot, hanged or deposed, Malta joins the European Union, you get a radio station licence from the Nationalist government under the new liberal laws, it’s burned down (some say you burned it down yourself, but they’re obviously lying), you host a show on the PN’s television station, then you host a show on the Labour Party’s television station, Malta changes beyond recognition from the days when you were minister of tourism in Mintoff’s cabinet…and you remain a Laburist.

A Labour sheep, whose political opinions don’t change even when it becomes ruddy obvious to anybody with his head screwed on that the Nationalist Party changed Malta unbelievably for the better, while the Labour Party in your time wrecked it.

Oh, and I have news for you, incidentally, about the days when you were tourism minister – you know, back in the literally dark ages when we were lucky to have electricity and water, but still you expected the tourists to come.

At a lunch meeting in Scotland a couple of years back, the subject turned to Malta – because I’m Maltese – and one of the guests there entertained the company with tales of his holiday in Malta back then when you were tourism minister.

He had stayed at one of Malta’s best hotels, incidentally, in the castigated Sliema/St Julian’s area, which your government subjected to routine water-cuts despite it being the tourism centre and tourists were punished along with the people who lived there.

“There was never any water in the bathroom when we got back from the beach,” this man told all the guests at lunch. “When we asked the hotel management why, they said ‘You have to take a shower in the morning because after that the water finishes.'”

Cue gales of laughter round the table.

“That was nothing,” he continued. “When we got out of the airport, after diving into a pile of suitcases to find ours in the heap where they had been dumped, the taxi drove straight into a massive crowd of people, all shouting and screaming and waving their fists in the air. It looked like a riot and my wife began crying. ‘Where have you brought me?’ she said, ‘Is this supposed to be a holiday?’ When we got to the hotel – and found no water – I tried to make up for it by booking a good restaurant, but after we walked through the pitch-dark streets to get there, we found them packing up and the owner said to us that they had to close because the power was off.”

There was more in that vein. Yes, you were tourism minister, Mr Grima: tourism minister in a dump. But as long as you are not a sheep…