This government is hard to fathom. Take the case of Villa Guardamangia. Last Tuesday, the Prime Minister said in Parliament that the State had bought it for an undisclosed sum (not for taxpayers to know how their taxes are spent), and that it would be ‘rescued’ and turned into a ‘mecca for tourists’.
A few minutes earlier in the same speech, the Prime Minister took a swipe at the Opposition: PN governments had only built new roads or resurfaced old ones when the Queen visited. A forgivably stale joke, but he then went on to announce that his government would rescue a historic building – because the Queen had lived in it.
It gets stranger. The Prime Minister skippers a government that’s so laissez-faire it would make Margaret Thatcher blush. It’s pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship and pro anything that involves people making their own buck undisturbed. Except now it’s the State that’s about to set up its own tourism business, rather in the manner of Nehru’s India. Go figure.
The Villa Guardamangia matter is one of those things. The more you look into and think about it, the more wrong and twisted it gets.
First, the chivalry argument. The government has rescued a grand dame in distress, to the applause of an audience of well-meaning organisations.
They’re also misguided, because it turns out that the house is being rescued from the orgy of destruction stewarded by the very government that’s rescuing it.
If the villa is given an armorial motto in the royal manner, it will have to be ‘Protected from yourselves’. (Suggested heraldry: bordure in Planning Authority azure with Sandro Chetcuti charge passant guardant and three or lozenges to symbolise the shining sun.)
Seriously, if an indictment were ever needed of the state of urban planning in Malta, this is it: a beautiful old house has to be saved from destruction by the grace and favour of the Prime Minister.
Put differently, Maltese taxpayers have just paid millions to save a site from the failings of a planning system funded by themselves, the taxpayers.
Taxpayers have just paid millions to save a site from the failings of a planning system funded by themselves
Next time you see a beautiful old house being pulled down, you know that the Queen didn’t live it, and that the Prime Minister didn’t think there was enough political mileage to be had from rescuing it. To rehearse the joke, it’s a pity the Queen didn’t get to be driven on more roads, or that she wasn’t in the habit of buying up more houses.
It all shows the people in government (or some of them) for the miserable philistines that they are. In their book, the only places worth preserving are those that can be turned into a tourist mecca. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but still.
Which brings me to the second argument. The Prime Minister also said that the house will be ‘restored’, presumably to its regal condition. Sounds great, until you do the unpacking.
There are two possibilities here. The first is that the house will be turned into a museum dedicated to the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth, along the lines of the Dürer house museum in Nuremberg, say. (Itself something of a tourist trap, truth be told.)
Thing is, Dürer was a son of Nuremberg. I can see why the city might want to showcase and commemorate him. I can’t see why Malta should want to spend millions to showcase the life of a foreign monarch.
Unless, of course, we think in purely commercial terms. The Prime Minister said that the site will be a roaring success with tourists, and I trust his judgement on this one. That’s how entrepreneurs who want to make money think. It’s not how governments that value culture ought to think.
The second possibility is that the house will be restored, filled with antiques that look the part (pity the big Augustinian sale is off) and mouldy royal family memorabilia, and called ‘the Queen’s house’. Some context is needed here. The whole point of house museums is that they evoke a feel of what life was like, partly through the in situ preservation of at least a few personal objects. Many don’t do that, but then Malta has no monopoly on rubbish.
Villa Guardamangia has a problem. It’s not as if the Queen’s dirty washing has languished under the stairs for 70 years. The house is empty. If anything at all from the period was left, it will have been sold off at an auction held last month.
Which means that the government is about to set up a fake and a simulacrum. I’d have absolutely no problem if the mover were a private entrepreneur. Business is business, and commercial ventures have a right to invest in and offer any manner of junk, if they think people will buy it. States, and the public interest they represent, are another matter.
The question here is not about authenticity (or the lack of it) as such, but rather about the wisdom of using public funds to set up tourist traps that sell an intrinsically fake culture on a purely commercial line of reasoning.
Taxpayers might wish to ask why the State is so cautious with public funds in things such as the Bibliotheca, a national and indeed world treasure that is falling to pieces through negligence and lack of resources.
The answer has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with its absence: to paraphrase the Prime Minister, the Bibliotheca does not hold the promise of a tourist mecca.
I really wouldn’t want to run the Villa Guardamangia museum shop. Customers might complain that the tat seemed to come right off the permanent exhibition.