One of his finest hours

Robert Abela has delivered one of his finest performances. His backdrop was not White Rocks and nor was it Manoel Island.

No sooner had the ink dried on the Electoral Commission’s Writ confirming four more years, that a farmhouse beside the Ġgantija Temples has been demolished to make way for 22 apartments and 20 garages.

The project was applied for, approved, processed, certified and duly blessed, with bulldozers charging in with an efficiency and alacrity that proved that this was no public works project but a private sector initiative pure and greedy.

One of the oldest free-standing structures on Earth, animating a landscape shaped by over five thousand years of history, is now about to acquire a development whose principal cultural contribution appears to be the provision of additional parking.

You almost have to admire the faux naïveté. The prime minister’s defence is that the development cannot be objectionable because the authorities approved it.

There is a certain elegance to that reasoning. The authorities were right because they approved it and we know they approved the right thing because they approved it.

Alice’s rabbit hole lives on and by Abela’s logic, every planning scandal in Maltese history was entirely acceptable until the day it became embarrassing.

A tale of Two Roberts unfolds before us, allowing us to contrast the one we meet whenever political winds are blowing in the right direction with the real one.

There’s a Robert Abela who is a passionate environmentalist, a guardian of open spaces. He discovers a profound attachment to greenery whenever a major development project becomes unpopular enough to threaten votes.

Under that one, White Rocks and Manoel Island were given the full artist’s impression treatment, showing happy citizens strolling through lush landscapes under blue skies while the prime minister looked on like St Francis of Assisi with a communications consultant.

Yet when the need to preserve votes dies away and a development beside a UNESCO World Heritage Site attracts objections from heritage organisations, environmental NGOs and assorted people capable of recognising a bad idea when they see one, the activist prime minister vanishes.

In his place up pops Robert Abela the Institutional Conservative, for whom the processes must be respected, resulting in the right experts having spoken.

It is a transformation so sudden that it deserves medical study.

Leaving aside medical miracles of transubstantiation from environmentalist to the developers’ bestest ever friend, future archaeologists will be fascinated.

Six thousand years from now, they may excavate the remains of 22 luxury apartments overlooking Ġgantija and conclude that the civilisation which built them possessed remarkable engineering skills, sophisticated administrative structures, and a truly breathtaking inability to recognise irony.