I am actually old enough to remember that the British prime minister was Edward Heath and in other circumstances he was Ted Heath. And that is exactly my point here.

Ed Balls calls himself that because 1. It’s affected, and 2. anybody called Edward Balls is going to have a serious problem.

Blubbertits beats Peppi Azzopardi hands down. The archbishop is repeatedly referred to as Challie Juda on his blog, and the Castille-appointed aide is whipping up his Labour readership into an anti-episcopal frenzy.

While we’re at it, hearing Trump say “We are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our secretary of defense” gave me the creeps.

Nothing beats Peppi Azzopardi repeatedly addressing different archbishops as “Mons”.

Bill and Tony are not abbreviations of the full name: those would be ‘Will’ and ‘Ant’.

Christian Cardona and Christopher Fearne call themselves Chris because nobody in Malta has ever been known to say Christian or Christopher. Face it – have you ever heard those names being used in full in any context? Because I haven’t.

I know a hundred Chrises but have never heard anybody say ‘Are you going to Christopher’s party tonight/is Christopher coming to lunch?’

Please, not Chreest! But there is precedent for informal names for politicians : Bill not William Clinton, Tony Blair not Antony. Sometimes it is to appear a ‘man of the people’. Other times the short version of the name sits more easily with the surname.

“No one objected to someone being called Eddie.”

I did, all the time. And ‘Eddie’ morphed into Edward the minute he walked through the doors of the Prime Minister’s Office. He signed off everything as Edward, as he should have done.

You can’t reasonably have a prime minister called Eddie, just as you can’t reasonably have a prime minister called Dom (though that was the least of it). Pajjiz tal-hamalli – because it’s not bad enough that we run around calling even people we don’t know from Adam by their first name, we also have to shorten it in case it kills us to pronounce two or three syllables.

I still think of you as Christopher, as it happens. And I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate that neither Christian Cardona nor Christopher Fearne calls himself ‘Christ’, which was probably the actual shortened form of their name when they were growing up in the sticks, and probably still is among their constituents.