Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Apparently, Malta’s economic success is now measured in horsepower, marina berths and the number of boarding passes tucked into the average family’s kitchen drawer.

Robert Abela says so.

Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

This is, after all, a Prime Minister who inhabits a world rather different from that of the families he lectures. If your own frame of reference includes a yacht, the Palace lifestyle and a few obvious concerns about supermarket bills or mortgage repayments, it is perhaps easier to confuse personal comfort with national prosperity.

Good luck to him, of course, the politics of envy finds no place in my lexicon, though no doubt ONE TV will cherry-pick in their usual fashion and accuse me of bitterness.

Whatever, in his interview with The Times of Malta, Abela proudly declared that Labour has transformed “luxuries” into everyday realities. Cars. Boats. Two foreign holidays a year. Apparently, that is now the government’s preferred economic dashboard.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

The difficulty is that economists, unlike politicians, are awkward people. They insist on talking about productivity, competitiveness, real wage growth, purchasing power, housing affordability and sustainable public finances. Curiously, none has ever suggested that prosperity should be measured by the number of dinghies bobbing in Maltese marinas.

Unless, perhaps, the discussion concerns unexplained wealth.

Listening to the Prime Minister, you could almost believe the National Statistics Office has quietly retired GDP in favour of BDU (Boats per Domestic Unit). Forget asking whether your salary goes further than it did three years ago or not. Forget asking whether your children have any realistic prospect of buying a home.

The real question, apparently, is whether you’ve upgraded from an inflatable to fibreglass.

There is something unmistakably Marie Antoinette about all this. Ordinary families do not measure success by whether they have acquired a boat. They measure it by whether they can replace the washing machine without reaching for the credit card, pay the mortgage without anxiety and leave something aside at the end of the month.

Abela’s argument suggests either that he does not understand the difference between consumption and prosperity, or that he assumes the rest of us do not.

Consumption is not wealth. Borrowing is not prosperity. Subsidies are not productivity. Government spending is not economic genius simply because the government is spending your money.

An economy fuelled by rebates, electoral giveaways, unprecedented public expenditure and a constant supply of cheaper imported labour can keep the tills ringing for years, but that says remarkably little about whether the country is becoming genuinely wealthier.

The irony is exquisite. Labour spent years promising that people deserved more. It now points to the fact that people are spending more as proof that they have become richer. Those are not remotely the same thing.

Abela grudgingly seems to concede that there are consequences: congestion, overdevelopment, strained infrastructure and relentless population growth. Yet these are treated as unfortunate side-effects rather than the inevitable bill for the economic model Labour itself chose.

And that bill will eventually arrive, even if, as Robert Abela wants us to believe, his government has delivered unprecedented prosperity.

Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

Someone leading a solid economy should aspire to something more substantial than counting SUVs and marina berths. A successful economy is one where young couples can buy a home without family subsidies, where wages genuinely outstrip inflation, where businesses compete because they innovate rather than because labour is cheap, and where prosperity survives even after the government stops handing out cheques.

Abela’s economic philosophy, on the other hand, can be reduced to a single proposition: if there are more shiny objects on display, the country must be thriving. That may be an excellent sales pitch for a yacht broker.

It is a decidedly thin one for the Prime Minister of Malta.