Friday, July 8, was the 200th anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s premature death in 1822, a month shy of his 30th birthday. He died while sailing from Livorno to Lerici, in Italy, after visiting his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron.

Though Shelley lived more than two centuries ago, he still speaks clearly to our age in his poetry, chastising political and moral corruption.

While this bicentenary was being commemorated, mostly in England and Italy, in Malta, hidden from the public, morally corrupt machinations were being put in motion to get the IVF amendment bill signed not by President George Vella, but by Acting President Frank Bezzina, without Vella honourably resigning. Resigning would have been the only proper thing to do.

There’s no beating about the bush: circumstances where a head of state refuses to sign a bill amounts to a constitutional crisis.

In such circumstances, the only way out for a republic (meaning ‘public good’) worthy of its name is to see the president (very honourably) resign and the election of a new president who would, presumably, sign the bill. Of course, this does not happen in banana republics. What has already happened in Malta reeks of the very moral corruption that raised Shelley’s hackles in Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things:

“Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by,

“Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky;

“And shall no patriot tear the veil away

“Which hides these vices from the face of day?

“Is public virtue dead? – is courage gone?”

The Labour government must have known from early June at least that President Vella was not going to sign the IVF bill. The government hid this important fact from parliament and the public, changed the person who would be acting president when needed and attempted to sweep a constitutional crisis under the carpet.

There’s no beating about the bush: circumstances where any head of state is refusing to sign any bill amounts to a constitutional crisis- Eddie Aquilina

An acting president cannot do anything the president would not do. That is clearly implied in his title. Acting president is a temporary office, a ‘stand-in’, an ‘understudy’, as Times of Malta aptly put it. The acting president certainly cannot do what the actual president would not do.

The president of our republic, if it is a real republic, should resign and clearly tell the public why. This would be admired by all, whatever their opinion about the IVF bill. It is hugely corrupt and immoral for the acting president to sign a bill that he knows the president would not, and did not, sign.

Shelley, in Queen Mab, criticised those who abandon their principles for the excuse of ‘obedience’:

“… obedience,

“Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

“Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame

“A mechanised automaton.”

Have our institutions become ‘mechanised automatons’, simple cogs in a hugely corrupt system that has no principle but money and squatting in public office?

Has corruption so devastated the high offices of our republic that we have to watch these immoral machinations rather than what is clearly the right thing to do?

Is it too much to expect ‘public virtue’ and ‘courage’ in our republic?

Great poetry transcends time and circumstance. In Ozymandias, Shelley described the inescapable ravages of time even on the most powerful. And in The Masque of Anarchy, he demanded “Deeds, not words”. Deeds are Vella’s fundamental duty to the republic he presides over. Courage and honour are immortal.