How about 365 Carnivals a year…?

Look: I don't know what it is about Labour and culture either, but it's starting to get on my nerves.

First it was Jason Micallef - more of whom later, as his comments earlier this week deserve to be properly annihilated - and then, before the collective shrieks of lamentation even had time to stop ringing in our ears, we get to find out about the appointment of Andy Ellul as secretary of the St James Centre for Creativity board.

Right. No offence to this fine, upstanding fellow or anything (don't know him personally but I do know his sister Sharon, and she is not exactly what you would call a 'philistine')... but on the basis of what credentials, exactly, was he appointed?

And since when are the words 'former police inspector' and 'lawyer' considered instant job clinchers in an application for the post of secretary to a national arts centre which also includes a cinema and a theatre?

While I'm on the subject, how was he appointed, exactly? Was there a call for applications? Was he hand-picked? And why wasn't the appointment made public through the DOI or any other official government instrument?

Sorry, folks, but this is precisely the sort of 'it's-only-culture-so-any-old-bloke-will-do' mentality that has already earned us an undeserved international reputation for plodding dilettantism in all things (except killing birds - for that, we have an entirely deserved international reputation for unparalleled excellence).

And besides, what's going to be next? At this rate we may as well have a government spokesperson or other proposing something completely absurd, such as... oh, I don't know, having three Carnivals for the price of one, for instance. I mean, that is precisely the sort of codswallop that...

Huh? What do you mean it's already happened? Wait, don't tell me: I can work it out for myself. It's a daft idea, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with culture. So obviously it has to be the declared intention of the parliamentary secretary for culture within the government of Malta.

Oh, and before you all go pointing fingers at Notting Hill - or other places in the world where 'carnivals' do exist in different formats and outside the traditionally allotted time of year, sorry, but the comparison doesn't hold. There are historical reasons to account for that particular event and others of its ilk.

Notting Hill's carnival traces its origins to the late 19th century, when a small, displaced Caribbean local population carried on the traditional August festivity of their native Trinidad and Tobago, mingling it with European customs, etc.

That, incidentally, is what makes Notting Hill such a cultural event: it has roots which run deep. Now just imagine that, instead of evolving out of the complex interweaving of 'new' cultures that was cosmopolitan central London in the age of Queen Victoria, Notting Hill carnival was actually just foisted upon that neighbourhood the other week, by a parliamentary secretary who evidently felt he had to somehow justify his own appointment to head one particular aspect of his government's portfolio.

Under those circumstances I somehow doubt it would be the same thing at all. But then again there's nothing stopping Boris Johnson (or whomever) from simply announcing three entirely random carnivals for, say, Clapham Junction, Camden Town and Ealing Broadway. Who knows? It might be a roaring success...

On the subject of 'roaring success'... actually, just 'roaring', it has reached my ears that Jason Micallef, the former One TV chairman and Labour Party secretary-general appointed to chair the Valletta Capital of Culture 2018 committee, has meanwhile claimed that 'the success of the V18 project will provide his critics with an answer to their complaints'. Or words to that effect, anyway.

Now, it just so happens that I number myself among the many critics he probably had in mind - so for what it is worth, here is my answer to his answer to our complaint about his appointment.

In the interest of convenience, practicality and general user-friendliness, I have divided it into two: a short version and a long version. Let's start with the short version, which is...

NO.

OK, now for the long version- What? You were actually expecting more? Oh all right then. When I say "No", I simply mean that Jason Micallef is incorrect. If V18 does turn out to be a successful project (and that, of course, remains to be seen) its success will have to be attributed to the hard work of a committee that has already been going at it hammer and tongs for years... and whose chairmanship Jason Micallef has technically usurped, for reasons which have manifestly nothing to do with either culture or with any other aspect of the V18 project.

In other words, the same success - if it even materialises at all - will have been achieved in spite of Jason's appointment and certainly not because of it. Besides, if Micallef is already planning from now on to bask in the glory of that possible future success, I shall have to pre-emptively 'remind' him that all he'll be doing under those circumstances is taking the credit for other people's work - nothing more, nothing less.

That's it for the short answer. The longer answer involves yet another logical fallacy that an astonishing number of people in this country seem simply incapable of ever grasping, not even when it whacks them full in the face with a baseball bat.

It goes like this: if V18 does turn out to be a tremendous success... and even if this future success could be partially or totally attributed (which is unlikely, but let's just suspend belief for a moment here) to any input by Jason Micallef... none of that will even remotely alter the fact that Micallef was chosen to chair that committee for all the wrong reasons, and in flagrant breach of the Labour Party's electoral commitment to choose people for public positions on the basis of their suitability to the post.

This brings me to another point, which is important to clarify now before anyone runs away with the idea that I have some kind of personal grudge against Jason Micallef.

I have nothing of the kind. OK, I admit I was not terribly impressed with his stint as PL secretary general - he was, in fact, singularly hopeless at that job, as evidenced by the spectacular loss of an election that I reckon even the Three Blind Mice would have had no difficulties winning hands down.

Nor am I particularly impressed with certain marketing and promotional decisions taken with regard to V18 since his appointment: for instance, that cringe-worthy moment when Malta's Eurovision score announcer went out of her way to describe Valletta as Europe's Capital of Culture 2018... when the rest of Europe was still in the year 2013.

Excuse me, but are we going to repeat that same line at every Eurovision song contest for the next five frigging years? And was that presenter even remotely aware that two other countries are currently hosting the cultural capital of Europe for this year - that is, not in five years' time, but RIGHT NOW - yet they didn't feel the need to point out what is ultimately a rather mundane and entirely irrelevant fact in front of an audience of an estimated 170 million people?

So no offence or anything, but if that's the sort of contribution we can expect from the newly appointed chair of the V18 committee... it kind of sucked, actually.

However, my real reservations about this appointment - and, to a lesser extent, the St James's one, too - concern how the present government evidently views public roles as the equivalent of so many dog biscuits with which to award faithful party cronies for performing clever little tricks.

Apart from being a tacky and generally regressive approach to such matters, it is also the clean opposite of what the M word we heard so often before the election actually means.

And in case the present government - just like the previous one - is so very far up its own backside that it can't appreciate the value of having people point out its mistakes, allow me to spell out the implications of this mistake in detail.

Meritocracy has more uses than just winning elections, you know. And its purpose goes far, far beyond the success or failure of any one individual project, or the credibility or otherwise of any one individual politician... even the credibility of the government as a whole.

What's really at stake here is a popular perception that absolutely everything in our country is stacked in favour of a chosen set of political favourites and against the non-political man in the street.

It seems the present government has blinded itself to this particular reality - strangely, seeing as it seemed incapable of seeing anything else before the election - but many people in this country really are sick and tired of always seeing the same old faces circulated among the same old positions, over and over again.

And they are right to be annoyed at this endless game of musical chairs. It gives the impression that as far as the nation's top decision-making entities are concerned, nobody even exists at all outside the limited circles of political stooges, bootlickers and apparatchiks.

Much worse, the same dogged insistence on dishing out public appointments only among a very limited pool of mostly unqualified and undeserving individuals also has the cumulative effect of sapping public confidence in the institutions themselves. Enthusiasm wanes under these conditions. Initiative dries up, and people tend to just switch off, keeping their own ideas and energy to themselves, knowing full well that their creativity will otherwise be plundered and the fruits of their endeavours simply given out to be enjoyed by other people.

Even the positions themselves tend to lose their lustre; in time they come to be viewed only as sops with which a government can mollify and accommodate people who may otherwise prove to be right royal pains in the government's arse.

I don't know about you, but all this is beginning to sound awfully familiar. Let's go over the basic plotline and see if it rings any bells, shall we?

It starts with a disgruntled backbencher who feels he deserved to be given a position he never got. To be fair he may even be justified in his disappointment - Jose Herrera was an effective Opposition MP, and as a lawyer he was instrumental in challenging many of the more serious injustices entrenched in the legal system. (For instance, he is one of the very few lawyers I know who openly questions the AG's discretion when it comes assigning cases to the upper or lower courts: a monumental injustice which is too complex to go into in any detail here.)

But his prime minister had other fish to accommodate in what is ultimately a very small pond; and instead of landing himself the ministry he evidently felt was owed to him, Herrera found himself accommodated in what he perceives to be a dead-end token appointment just to keep him quiet.

Obviously the same general circumstances also apply to others - including the main architect of the PN's recent spontaneous combustion (in whose case, by an interesting coincidence, the coveted position was also the justice ministry).

Any surprise, then, that in both cases the disgruntled backbencher would use his newly-acquired position to settle a personal score with his prime minister?

This, I fear, is the real story behind Jason Micallef's appointment: and if it also sounds like the story behind the PN's catastrophic fall from power just last month... that's probably because it is written to the exact same script, using the exact same soundtrack, and with only an almost imperceptible change to the dramatis personae.

But there are a couple of other small differences. The first is that, where the PN took a few years for its seemingly unassailable run on power to finally go to its head, the Labour government has already started behaving as though every little nook and cranny of the public service is actually its own private property - within less than 100 days of winning the election.

My gut feeling tells me that must be a record in political U-turns... but then again that there have been so many of those under the previous administration it's hard to say with any certainty.

The second difference is that unlike Lawrence Gonzi, Joseph Muscat enjoys the unprecedented luxury of a nine-seat majority to fall back on. He can therefore afford to have a backbencher throw a strop here and there; for even if Herrera decides to 'do a Franco', and threatens to vote against his government in parliament... so what? Muscat is politically strong enough to simply sit through the resulting storm. It would take a revolt of nine or more MPs to unseat him; and that is the equivalent of the PL splitting into two parties (and yes, I know this happened before but it hardly looks a likely possibility right now).

So if this is what we got in just 100 days of Labour, perhaps Herrera's idea of multiple carnivals may not be so bizarre after all. The way these guys are gearing up to run the country, we may yet have Carnival 365 days a year.