God Save the Queen

It is hard to tell when Kenneth Zammit Tabona writes about the Queen whether he is referring to himself or to the sovereign ruler of the United Kingdom, or Queen Bess as he chummily refers to her. As testament to his fairy-footed effeteness, the opening paragraph of his latest column is nothing but a sequence of prosaic affectations worthy of I.M. Beck at his very worst:

"To most of these 'gels' with more money than sense, the intricacies of equine bloodlines and speeds per furlong are a cabbalistic mystery; not so to Her Majesty, who, while her troops suffer needlessly in war-torn Iraq, is content to leave King Tony in charge doing the real work and getting all the flak for it too. The Queen may know all there is worth knowing about quadrupeds but where survival is concerned she is certainly no fool; she also has no hang-ups and insecurities as far as original millinery is concerned!"

What all this literary mincing all means is quite beyond me, though I am fairly confident Zammit Tabona is attempting, with embarrassing amateurishness, to satirise the mores of the British upper class while simultaneously working in some acerbic political commentary. While I have absolutely no interest in dwelling upon the merits of the Queen's constitutional authority, I am worried that the moment has come when any oaf can exercise himself in feeble caricatures of figures of authority. Not that these people are not deserving subjects of criticism or mockery, but the twittery of such commentators as Zammit Tabona cannot but serve to undermine the validity of such endeavours.
His giddy opener, however, soon reveals itself as nothing but a prelude to a broadside against the peccadilloes of "the hapless Victor Emmanuel wannabe IV of Italy". I confess that my free time is fairly limited these days, but should KZT wish, I could quickly glance over his preposterous articles before he files, if only to sort out the woeful mish-mash of demotic styles and hone the P.G.Wodehouse-lite tone every other Maltese columnist believes they are affecting:

"Elizabeth II, despite her disastrously deficient progeny, is, despite the Mrs Bucket hats, a success story quite unlike the hapless Victor Emmanuel wannabe IV of Italy, now languishing in an Italian gaol on charges of prostitution and corruption. Having lived most of his life in exile, this descendant of kings, emperors and dukes, cast to the winds the overriding maxim that royalty has to live automated lives as chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche."

As if the vaguely schizophrenic quality of most Times' columnists were not bad enough, almost all of them are forced by the childish layout of the newspaper to indulge in a string of non sequitirs loosely linked together by transparent, and ultimately failed, devices like the following:

"The Casa Savoia has lost the plot for good.
Therefore to move to a slightly different location, Brussels, we have had some equally contrasting voting by our own home-grown MEPs."

The "therefore" festers there like week-old roadkill, but it does the job. As much as it may look like it, Zammit Tabona’s 1,305 words of drivel will not just write themselves. Sadly, for the
long-suffering readers of The Times, they won’t read themselves either; so, on and on, you must plough on through an alternation between faux profundity and domestic troubles so trivial they sound like the transcript from a fishwives’ conversation.
Suitably, his concluding paragraph is a chronicle of political and journalistic squabbles so clearly designed exclusively for Zammit Tabona’s own insular readership that he cannot deign himself to make any sense at all:

“In addition, Charles Polidano was reported to have had a violent altercation with a fellow columnist [Note: As violent as a handbag to the face can be] about whether he is or isn't a baron. I believe the case has been referred to the Committee of Privileges of the Maltese Nobility and is being considered. Despite all this David Casa attended the rally because he said he believed that the environment was the PN's top priority and had the audacity to mention the landfills affair that was stopped simply because a brave MP had the gall to stymie his own party. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando where are you?”