I have no problem with official cars, as long as they are used for official business. That’s exactly where the trouble lies.

I do have a problem with the perks attached to the president’s job. This is supposed to be republic. If we wished to carry on with three official palatial residences, an entire staff, an ADC, a chef and all the rest of it, we should have kept the British monarch as our head of state. It’s would have been far more socialist.

Also, there is no reason for the prime minister to have a “country house” (Girgenti – fantasies of Chequers), a palatial home for the spouse (Villa Francia – never intended for that purpose), in addition to the official seat (Castile).

Just yesterday, our rubbish leaders made the usual grandiloquent speeches about 41 years of republic.

This doesn’t look like a republic. It looks like a monarchy with an aristocracy of commoners. And no concept of limitation of powers.

I have no doubt at all that things will continue in this fashion well after I’m gone.

There ought to be a consensual definition of what is required to preserve a modicum dignity and decorum. For example, you can’t expect the President to drive to the airport in her car to greet QEII.

On the other hand, I cannot understand why so many civil servants are chauffeured around the island at our expense or why official cars are used to run personal errands. So, wipe out all the perks and let the parties put their heads together to agree what is reasonable. Until they do, let them take the bus to work.

And no more official residences paid for by us?

Nobody, is the simple answer. Let them all use the same means if transport they expect us to use – public transport – or their own car at their own expense.

It’s about time that the consequence of “a Constitutional role”, whichever it is, starts being a service rendered BY the holder of that role not TO them, whether it is the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, or some head of department, the Constitutional role of the last of whom is not quite clear to me.

I’m not saying they don’t all render a service to the community, but they seem to serve themselves a trifle too generously for the service they give, notable as it is, which gives grounds to the common perception that they don’t fight tooth and nail to acquire “a Constitutional role” in order to be able to serve, but more likely to be served.

Shame on Reno Bugeja.

Under his stewardship, PBS has become almost as objective and impartial Pellegrini’s Xandir Malta.

Anywhere else in the civilised world he would have been ripped apart (figuratively speaking) by the press. But this is Malta and our, so called, journalists, seem to see nothing wrong in this blatant, self-serving conduct.

In these matters, it’s either all or nobody.