Would You Like Food With Your Salt?

As the Book of Proverbs tells us, “he that has knowledge spares his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit. Even a fool, when he holds his peace, is counted wise: and he that shuts his lips is esteemed a man of understanding”.
As this quote evidences, even the teachings of the Holy Scriptures show us that baby Jesus would appreciate it if, from time to time, such people as would be normally predisposed to brimming over with pointless waffle would only restrain themselves from stating the obvious. Yet for all their Solomonic wisdom, what the assembled busybodies behind the Book of Proverbs potboiler could not have apprehended back in Bible days is that newspapers simply do not write themselves. No indeed, people like Frank Salt write them.
When Salt first began writing his pieces for The Times, people might have been forgiven for wondering how his real estate background could possibly give him the grounds to set forth on whatever tickled his fancy. My own dealings with estate agents have gratefully been circumscribed to their periodical extortion of my earnings and the odd call on my part to complain about a mouldy fridge. If, however, Matthew the estate agent had ever presumed to come round to my flat to share his views on the importance of a prudent fiscal policy for a country's stability, well I'm not sure what I might have done.
If, moreover, he had shouted advice on how to save water through the letterbox while I cowered behind the sofa pretending to be out, things could have taken an ugly turn. After all, just like lawyers, estate agents are at best licensed thieves. You would no more ask an estate agent for energy-saving tips, than you would ask a cat burglar for advice on what locks to install. Sure enough, Matthew (that weedy little creep) never transgressed in the ways described above. But not so Frank Salt.
Having gorged himself to satiety on the easy riches that a profession that even a trained seal could master without much difficulty, Salt has imperiously announced that he has no aspiration to see his fellow countrymen join him in his state of Cheshire cat smugness.

"I know it might sound strange, but one of my worst nightmares is that Malta strikes a lot of oil in our territorial waters, become a very rich country, and then the population will not have to work or want to work, so they sit down and do nothing."

Do nothing but write barely literate columns for the Times that is.
But before the Maltese reader is tempted to cast themselves into deeper penury by furiously flinging their PC out of the closest opening of their windowless hovel, please consider that ceci n'est pas une article, as Magritte himself might have quipped.
Sure enough, a quick scan down the page reveals the horrible truth that Frank Salt is "the former chairman of the MTA's Product Planning and Development Directorate". When the clods at the MTA are not doing a group impersonation of Inspector Clouseau, it transpires they might be taking the advice of this erstwhile camarade de bataille in their bid to civilise the semi-feral Maltese nation.
As is often the case with self-appointed sages, Salt deals with onerous burden of concocting actual solutions with a dizzying hail of rhetorical inquisitiveness:

“Now what will happen when the low-cost airlines start coming to Malta and become very successful? Make no mistake about it, in the future they will be very successful indeed, and so too will Air Malta. What will happen then? Will some of these new tourists be accommodated in the same substandard hotels? Will some of our hotels stay in the same dilapidated condition they are in now? Will these hotel owners say thanks for the tourists and do nothing to rejuvenate and renovate their premises?”

This passage reeks of Salt’s terror at how Malta’s barbaric lumpenproletariat will foul up this golden opportunity. And, as we all know, estate agents are such a delicate breed.
As usual with these wretched columns, the substance is Procol Harum pale and found ferreted away in some apologetic mouse of a paragraph:

“The Malta Tourism Authority has established rules, regulations and standards, and these must all be enforced properly so that when we receive the large increase of tourists that will definitely be coming to Malta and Gozo, they will all be accommodated at a standard they deserve.”

In short, the MTA should do its job, instead of rushing around and overacting like some pantomime dame. But since Salt himself is the "the former chairman of the MTA's Product Planning and Development Directorate", you have to wonder how many of those halcyon days were spent in the shameful indulgence of getting “away with not doing anything”.