Through gritted teeth, Joseph Muscat smiled as he listened to Renzo Piano present ideas for a new Parliament House last June. What he saw was so self-evidently attractive that he could not bring himself to say he did not like it and he spent the next nine months avoiding the subject of the City Gate project.

His party's statement on the day said that Labour was "positive" about the project and acknowledged that "everyone will have their own preferences and it is impossible for everyone to agree", implying that someone will have to decide even though a controversy is sadly inevitable.

Dr Muscat was sharing the same hymn book with Astrid Vella. On TV she told a reporter her organisation "absolutely agreed" with Mr Piano's idea for two separate projects: one for a Parliament and the other for a performance space at City Gate.

The controversy, deemed inevitable by Labour, predictably followed. The debate on whether to rebuild Barry or do something else altogether with the site at the entrance to Valletta is anything but new.

In the public record there are 46 proposals before Piano's on what to do with the site. The one thing they have in common is that, for some reason or other, they were all found to be controversial and ultimately abandoned. In confront-ation with each of these proposals was the nostalgic alternative, preferable for some, to rebuild an opera house on the site, cancelling history and rebuilding the site on Barry's plans; making the new look old and the old forgotten.

In March 1955, Prime Minister Dom Mintoff had one thing to say to the Barry nostalgics: "Don't think I don't like culture" - he needed to point that out - "but that site is simply too small for a theatre to be economically sustainable." For once he got it right!

Still, those who wished for an opera house had the right to make their wishes and views known. They were not entirely coherent about their views. Some wanted Barry back, some did not really care as long as it looked like La Fenice on the inside. Some wanted a full-scale opera house (that would have needed six Valletta blocks to build) and some would have been happy with another Mediterranean Conference Centre hall that sounded better. But incoherence is a forgivable characteristic of positions knocked out of petitions and protests. And the wish for a full-scale professional theatre is no less understandable for that.

The argument became unfortunate when, perhaps in anger, perhaps to compensate for incoherence, the plans to build a new Parliament House were presented as an elitist obstruction to a populist project of building a theatre "for the people".

It would have been a little less surprising if this argument had been made by some 30,000 petitioners asking for the money to be diverted to cover the Ta' Qali stadium grandstand with an all-round enclosure. But this schizophrenic socialism was frankly a little bit rich, considering its source.

In any case, this rhetoric of "the people", however misplaced, proved too tempting for Labour. Dr Muscat and his predecessors often had to compensate for appearing uncouth and insensitive to art. Their put-on machismo of preferring a burger in Sicily to a black tie state occasion was and is a natural extension of that boiler suit hero iconography they live on.

Like the French revolutionary who saw the crowd run past him, Dr Muscat perceived the glitterati's protests and thought "I have to chase that crowd so I can lead them". Ms Vella chased the leader chasing the crowd.

Falling over himself to appear bourgeois, Dr Muscat forgot to even keep the pretence of demo-cratic instinct.

After nine months of careful neutrality, he now declared himself against the building of a Parliament House. Not because he would rather have an opera house (where burgers are unlikely intermission features), nor because he can think of a better use for the money: he cannot.

Dr Muscat is against Parliament House because hostility to our democracy poisons the blood-stream of his party. This is why he argues that a "majority" is against this national project.

This is why he counter-intuitively pretends to shed tears over a theatre he would never visit when his real frustration is to witness the erection of the first Parliament House in the 90-year history of our democracy, which his party would have preferred to have been much shorter.