Let's make a Maltese cross

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Booker discusses an article by Roland Rudd:

"Surely you don't want to be run by Malta?" was the headline over a piece in The Daily Telegraph last week. Some of us sad followers of the more arcane details of EU politics assumed that this was a long overdue attack on the fact that Britain's fishing waters, once the richest in the world, are now run by a gentleman from Malta called Joe Borg.

When I met Mr Borg as Malta's foreign minister in 1999, I little thought that this dim little apparatchik would one day, as the EU's fisheries commissioner, exercise more power over our fishing waters and our near-defunct fishing industry than any minister in Britain. But, alas, the Telegraph article, by the chairman of Business for New Europe, was not concerned with the realities of how we are already "run by Malta". It was merely endorsing the EU constitution's proposal that the EU should put an end to the farce of its six-monthly "rotating presidency" and, like any self-respecting state, be given a permanent president. But only, presumably, so long as he is not Maltese.