The way President Nikos Christodoulides speaks in public, nobody would have guessed that he had once had a career as a diplomat, that he served for almost five years as foreign minister and for four years before that as the spokesman of the Anastasiades government. With such a background, it is extremely difficult to explain the clumsy way in which he expresses himself in public. He may be a politician rather than a diplomat now, but he is also the president and is expected to exhibit some diplomatic skill in public discourse, because his words, thanks to this position, are taken seriously.

His outburst about the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI) on Sunday morning was not what anyone would expect from the head of state. He was asked to comment on a news report claiming that Admie, the project promoter of the GSI, filed its objection regarding the €25m a year the Cyprus government proposed to pay until 2029, in a letter it sent Cera, Cyprus’ energy regulator. The report was not entirely accurate, as a subsequent statement by Admie pointed out, which makes the president’s outburst even less justified. He could have avoided comment by pleading ignorance of Admie’s objection.

Instead, he said: “If the head of Admie thinks that with such letters or with paid announcements the Cyprus Republic can be blackmailed, he obviously does not know who he is dealing with. The Cyprus government cannot be blackmailed by any head of Admie and is here only to safeguard the interests of the Cypriot people.” Was such aggressive talk necessary, considering that GSI is a joint venture agreed by the governments of Cyprus and Greece, and that the Greek state owns 51 per cent of Admie? This uncalled for, grandstanding may have been one of the reasons Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hastily called a meeting later on Sunday with Admie and his energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou.

On Monday morning, Papastavrou responded directly to the president’s talk of blackmail, by fully backing Admie and speaking about mixed signals. He said that 51 per cent of Admie belongs to the Greek Republic which does not blackmail, but only talks institutionally. He said he would discuss the matter with his Cypriot counterpart at the next EU meeting of energy ministers, that Greece-Cyprus relations were inviolable and were above any project. Apart from criticising Christodoulides’ harsh accusation, he also gave him an embarrassing lesson on how to speak diplomatically. More worrying is the fact that Greece’s government seems unwilling to put up with the president’s and finance minister’s grandstanding about the project.

Is there a future for the project? Before his ‘blackmail’ accusations, Christodoulides had said that when he met Mitsotakis in New York, they had “very specifically agreed” on how to proceed with the project. Why had he not left the matter there? That is what a responsible leader would have done.