Gonzi has left the building....

... And strangely, no one wants to talk about the astonishing mess he left for everyone else to clean up.

Quite the contrary. Judging by some of the more remarkable reactions out there - at least, the ones I could actually read without feeling an urge to puke - anyone would think Malta has just lost some kind of grand old statesman or other: that the man who has just bowed out of politics did not financially bankrupt his own party over the past 10 years; that he was not guilty of repeatedly firebombing his own government's credibility by announcing one impossibly grand project after another... hardly any of which ever saw the light of day.

And above all, that the same Lawrence Gonzi didn't also succeed in alienating and pushing away an unprecedented number of former Nationalist sympathisers, resulting in the heaviest defeat for that party in its entire 120-year history.

In fact I am beginning to wonder, Is there another Lawrence Gonzi out there that I'd never heard of before? A man who actually deserves all the praise currently being showered upon him, by all the people who somehow benefited from government largesse during his tenure in office?

Er... no, I guess not. Only one Gonzi retired from politics this week; and as he bears no resemblance whatsoever to the 'great and glorious leader' so many people have been banging on about, I can only conclude that the entire country must have developed a closet drug problem while I wasn't looking.

Interestingly, one of the people who sang Lawrence Gonzi's praises louder than others this week was... Lawrence Gonzi, who wrote what can only be described as a 'self-eulogy' in The Times. Oh, sure he acknowledges having 'made mistakes' - though he stops short of telling us what they were.

But coming from a man who single-handedly demolished the Nationalist Party's credibility on so many fronts, causing damage that may even prove impossible to undo in the short term - I for one did expect at least a hint of self-deprecation in there somewhere.

Nope, nothing of the kind. Instead, Gonzi took full credit for any positive developments that occurred on his watch, whether or not they were in any way attributable to any of his own policies as prime minister.

In reality, very few of them were. Gonzi's entire reputation as a 'safe pair of hands' when it came to economic management - apart from being rather astounding, seeing as the same Gonzi also managed to double the national debt, repeatedly incur EU infringement procedures for violating the growth and stability pact, while simultaneously bankrupting the once-liquid PN - must now be seen against the backdrop of an economy that is still going strong, despite a change in government more than 16 weeks ago.

Which raises the question, How many jobs have been lost since March 9, as so many political pundits had gleefully anticipated before the election? How many factories and other workplaces have since closed shop, and how many new enterprises have since started operating in Malta?

The answer should finally lay to rest that tired old myth many people are currently trying very hard to perpetuate: the myth that Gonzi was a misunderstood politician who was somehow let down by incompetent twits at lower rungs on the government ladder.

Like all myths, this one is incredibly easy to explode. For instance: surely it cannot be a coincidence that on the day that Lawrence Gonzi gave his final farewell to politics speech in parliament (which incidentally reminded me of all those South American telenovelas my grandmother used to watch, "Tesoro, ti devo lasciare..." "NOOO! Se mi lasci, come faccio a sopravivere da sola?" - at which point my grandmother would quietly wipe away a tear while turning over a sizzling slice of laham panura in the frying pan...)

Hang on, where was I? Ah yes: on the same day as Lawrence Gonzi gave us his own cover version of 'Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You', live from the House of Representatives, it was separately revealed that the Valletta moat embellishment project (estimated cost  €1.9 million) has had to be shelved for lack of funds.

In case you don't immediately see the connection, bear in mind that the Valletta moat embellishment was part of the Renzo Piano Valletta entrance project (estimated cost €80 million), which until this week was arguably the only one of Gonzi's grand schemes to have actually got off the ground.

Does anyone remember how this project was originally going to be financed? Let me remind you: through a special purpose vehicle, created by the government to rent out properties as they were passed over from the Church to the State via something called the 'joint office'.

If I didn't know any better, I'd assume that the above reference was to 'joints' of another kind altogether. Clearly, some kind of psychoactive ingredient must have been involved in the concoction of a scheme to raise €80 million through property rental, at a time when government didn't even have an inventory of such properties in the first place (and I know, because I asked the former Lands Department director Jason Azzopardi for a copy at least a dozen times, and he always told me it was 'still being compiled').

Well, the upshot is that now - with the parliament building rapidly approaching completion - there are obviously not enough funds to complete the entire undertaking. What does this tell us about the long-term strategic and operational planning that went into the original project when it was first announced?

Taken in isolation, this single incident provides a blueprint for the celebrated 'new way of politics' Gonzi so famously said he would introduce back in 2004. It works like this:

Step 1: Prime minister wakes up one fine morning with an idea in his head, which - no matter how unlikely or fantastical - he instantly decides to foist upon the entire country, with little or no consideration for the possible ramifications (or, for that matter, who is ultimately going to pay for it).

Step 2: Next thing we know, a small army of civil servants (and other mysterious life-forms) will have crawled out of the woodwork in order to turn the prime minister's harebrained idea into reality, before he himself even had time to properly think it through, whereupon he would finally realise that, well, perhaps it wasn't such a good idea after all. But by then it would already be too late. Forces will now be in motion to implement this latest fantasy project, and any attempt to stop it now will only translate into instant loss of face.

Step 3: Having finally realised what a crappy idea it all along was, Gonzi will now try (with varying degrees of success) to block his own proposal. If successful, he will take the full credit for having averted a catastrophe that he himself enthusiastically advocated just a short while earlier. If not, he will invariably find a scapegoat within his own party, who will have to assume responsibility for the disaster he created himself. (And curiously, Gonzi never even understood why his popularity nosedived among his own parliamentary colleagues. What did he expect? That they would be forever grateful for being constantly blamed for all his own cock-ups?)

One fine example concerns the divorce referendum, which Gonzi simply proposed off the top of his head as he stepped out of parliament one fine morning, thus setting off an infernal machine which he would try unsuccessfully to stop ticking (and that was before he went on to vote against the result of a referendum that had been held at his own insistence).

The same pattern holds true for pretty much all his record as prime minister, which - looked back upon today - comes across as a never-ending list of failed projects and grandiose schemes, all presented with much fanfare and triumphalism in their day, only to inevitably fizzle out into nothing.

The Xaghra L-Hamra golf course idea, for instance, originated when Gonzi's government 'inherited' a sizeable parcel of land in Manikata through the divestiture of Air Malta's assets. What to do with the land? Let's see now... decisions, decisions... how about... a golf course? Yes, let's have a nice little golf course to keep the hospitality and leisure industry happy. After all, you can site those things pretty much anywhere you like... can't you?

Er, no, Dr Gonzi, you can't. Certainly not on agricultural land that has been tilled by the same farming community for generations out of memory. Nor can you realistically site a golf course on a stretch of protected garigue, which is perched on the water table to boot...

Ah, but by this time it was too late. The farmers had already been evicted: children, grandmothers and all. The expensive EIA had already been commissioned. Forces were in motion to see to it that the will of Gonzi was done, in Manikata as it was in Castille... Why? Because in small, petty little places with no sense of history whatsoever and with only a limited understanding of democracy, the 'will of the glorious leader' is usually considered enough to override any objection based on paltry little scientific or humanitarian concerns. So screw the farmers, screw the water table, screw everybody and everything... we must have a golf course at Manikata, because that's what our Mexxej said we must have. End of story.

Only it wasn't quite the end. In this case, the sheer dottiness of the whole idea eventually became manifest to everyone and his golf caddy, and the proposal had to be sheepishly withdrawn, to be replaced by a face-saver in the form of the "Majjistral National Park".

What happened next? Why, Gonzi immediately boasted about how utterly fantastic his own personal proposal for a public park had all along been and how stupid of that nameless civil servant, whoever he or she was, to propose a golf course (of all silly things) instead...

There are other examples. Remember the one about 'artificial islands'? Or 'deepwater  wind farms'? Well, look around you, and tell me, How many artificial islands or deepwater wind farms do you see?

If the answer is zero, it might have something to do with the fact that artificial islands are things you only really ever see in places like Dubai... which can afford them... And you don't see deepwater wind farms anywhere at all, because the technology to support them doesn't actually exist.

Yet we spent a good half a million on consultancies to come to those same conclusions, which was very good news for consultancy firms, yes, but in the wind farm case, the consequences of failure were serious.

Malta still has a target to produce 20% of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020 - yet not only did Gonzi fail utterly to ever raise our production beyond the practically non-existent level of 0.02% in 10 whole years, but he actually RAISED Malta's maximum carbon emissions, so that the Delimara power station could be run on the most heavily polluting fuel available. (Note: Of course, the fact that some people were making packets of money in fuel procurement for Enemalta at the time had absolutely nothing to do with this decision whatsoever. Got it? Good.)

But perhaps the best example remains the proud announcement of an 'imminent' sports complex at White Rocks. This one is vintage Gonzi from beginning to end. First he announces, trumpets blaring, that a deal has been clinched with a British consortium to build a super-duper, state-of-the-art sports facility straight out of 'Star Trek - The Fit Generation'. Before we know it, the Nationalist media rounds savagely on the Labour opposition (and anyone else, including this newspaper), challenging all sceptics to oppose this project 'because it would mean that you are opposed to sports". I kid you not, that is an exact quote from NET News.

Do I need to point out how this one ended up? Just like all the other fairytale projects dreamt up by the Gonzi administration but never actuated. It turned out that the consortium was less interested in the sports side of things and more in developing the site's potential for real estate purposes, at a time when MEPA had already drawn up a 'no more apartments' policy, thus ruling out any residential development on the same site.

So the consortium lost interest and pulled out - but only after Gonzi had already announced the deal with the usual boastfulness and self-assurance.

Meanwhile, I will not credit Gonzi - as some people are doing today - for taking a stand against racism. He himself may have always been cautious in how he talked about immigration in public. But he also upheld an immigration policy that nurtured ill-feeling towards ethnic minorities; and he practically looked the other way when people urged him to address the problem of mounting xenophobia, a problem he simply refused to acknowledge even existed, until it suddenly landed in the lap of a Labour government - whereupon Gonzi suddenly resorted to all the criticism that was, until very recently, levelled at himself.

Sorry to be blunt, but this is not the sort of behaviour that earns you high praise in serious countries. It is actually the sort of shabby mediocrity that gets laughed to scorn in serious political circles... but it had to be mentioned, given the sheer amount of poppycock currently now being written about the man who wrecked the PN.