There’s a lot of fuss being made about a film-clip showing Jason Micallef, the secretary-general of the Labour Party, saying unwise things during a private event. “We will be a government for all Maltese and Gozitans,” he said, “but between these four walls I can tell you that we will be a government for Labour supporters, (Gvern tal-Laburisti) and will do justice by Labour supporters in the first few months (of power). This time there will be no dragging of feet. We are not in any way inferior to the Nationalists. We will be in government for five whole years or 10 years, with Alfred Sant as leader.”

I find this sort of thing to be enervating. Rather than striking fear into me, the thought of a government made up of that lot on the Opposition benches fills me with a profound sense of ennui. There is an inescapable truth, but one that Alfred Sant and his party refuse to acknowledge. It’s not just the Nationalist Party that bores us to death. It’s the Labour Party, too. The Labour Party has been exactly the same for 20 years, half my lifetime, led by the same man and with the same people yapping and bickering in the background about exactly the same things.

When people say they want change, that’s exactly what they mean. They want change, not a version of a Swiss cuckoo clock in which Lawrence Gonzi goes in and Alfred Sant pops out instead. The chance to look at Alfred Sant for another 10 years, this time in the prime minister’s seat, is not change. Sant isn’t reading our lips: we are as heartily sick of the Opposition as we are of the government. We’ve had our fill of looking at the lot of them. We want a clean sweep all round. Opposition – out! Government – out!

The only feelings I can conjure up at the thought of Alfred Sant as prime minister, and I have to work really hard to have any feelings about it at all, are the kind I used to have in double maths, and the kind I have now during the sixth session of a long conference, as the umpteenth beige man in a grey suit and an “amusing” tie takes to the podium to tell us what he plans to do “going forward”.

Alfred Sant is 60. If a 60-year-old man gets run over by a bus, the television news tells us that it happened to a ragel anzjan. He has been leader of the Labour Party for 20 years and prime minister for 22 months. And yet he insists on presenting himself to the electorate as the new and coming man, with his party of nodding dogs colluding in this silliness. Next year, he will be officially classed as elderly, eligible for both a Kartanzjan and a pension, but he continues to tell us that he is young and thrilling. This is clearly ridiculous, but nobody is allowed to say so. So let me be the guilty party and say it myself: this is an old man we are talking about, and what’s more, an old man in a wig.

His entire party must be in denial if they believe that the pretence can go on for much longer. The past 20 years of his leadership have been a huge waste of time for Alfred Sant. They’ve been a huge waste of time for the Labour Party, too, but they’re the ones who chose him, retained him, and reassured him after the last election that he could come home because all was forgiven. They have only themselves to blame for their 20 years in the wilderness. It needn’t have been that way, and they know it. For 20 years, Alfred Sant has sat in the wings and heckled with his messages of doom, using his 22 months in government to churn out one balbuljata after another. Now he wants the chance to be septuagenarian prime minister. Oh, please – make way for the new.

* * *

Whichever way I look, there are politicians refusing to turn out the light and ride off into that sunset to take up golf and gardening. It’s not just in politics, either. This island is riddled with people who just won’t let go, who sit there blocking out the light, who don’t realise when the time has come to move aside and let the younger crowd through. Now we even have Guido de Marco proposing the setting up of a Council of State, made up of former presidents who will give sage advice on how to run the country.

For pity’s sake, which former presidents might those be? To my knowledge, there are only three others: one is a nonagenarian (and to his credit, he shot the suggestion down), one is in a care home, and the other is Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, who is in graceful retirement. It’s bad enough that they seem to have acquired out of nowhere the title of President Emeritus – largely because, I suspect, of the most recent addition to their ranks. The description of a former president as a former president used to suffice, but ah, no more! Some really do believe it is an official title, instead of an assumed one, and are confused to the extent that I once saw Dr Tabone, who is not the sort who worries about his status, described in a magazine article as “Emeritus Censu”. How he must have laughed.

Some people just won’t let go. I’m not a big one for quoting the Bible, but I particularly love the phrase from Ecclesiastes – to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens. The most desperate people I know are the ones who refuse to accept the changes that life brings at regular stages, or the fact that newer generations replace the older ones, which is the natural order of things.

* * *

If Alfred Sant is in power for 10 years, then he will have been party leader for 30 years by the end of it. That’s why the prospect fills me with nothing other than mind-numbing boredom. Imagine then how younger people feel about it. When this election’s first-time voters were born, Sant had been party leader for two years already. They grew up looking at him. He is part of the political furniture. I know how they must feel because I endured the same thing. The first time I had a vote was in the 1987 election, and both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party were dominated by politicians who had been there since the 1960s. Their faces were as familiar to me as a jar of Marmite, though nowhere near as interesting. They seemed to have been around forever, like the family tortoise, which is unsurprising because they had been stomping around in the forum since I was in nappies.

There are three first-time voters in our house, and they quickly zap any politician of whatever stripe who appears on the television. The last time I insisted on listening for two minutes, which was months ago, the eyes of the first-time voter on the sofa glazed over with tedium. He wanted to know for how much longer I was going to watch those jerks whining. You should take an interest, I said, you’re going to vote soon. But as far as they’re concerned, they have an EU passport and that’s all that matters. There are no more big issues, nothing to get worked up about. When a country moves towards freedom and democracy, politics becomes something for stuffy middle-aged people and pensioners. Young people need issues. Without issues to motivate them and get active about, like Vietnam in the 1960s, banning the bomb in the 1970s, and our own struggle for democracy and human rights in the 1980s, no 20-year-old is going to be politically engaged unless through a nerdish desire to become a party apparatchik.

I am grateful even for disparaging comments, adopting the line of reasoning that negative interest is interest all the same. At least they’re not blanking it out altogether. On Sunday mornings, which dawn at roughly 2pm, two of the first-time voters occasionally honk with derision over the newspapers: “Look at what he said! What an idiot.” “Listen to this! What was he thinking?” The other first-time voter might sometimes ask to have the offending piece described to him, so that he needn’t actually read it.

The way they look at it, all the politicians can go and hang themselves, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference to their lives. There’s nobody at all who captures their imagination, nobody to get excited about. How could there be? To an 18-year-old, politicians in their 50s and 60s are dinosaurs from other age, if not also from another planet. The dinosaurs do not understand this. They can’t see it. Like those old crones and ageing roués in the social pages, they still think of themselves as gloriously captivating, and are nonplussed to find that they have failed to fascinate.

* * *

There is just one matter that piques my curiosity about Prime Minister Sant aging from 60 to 70 under the glare of the public spotlight. How on earth will he manage that wig? Over the past few years, we have watched without comment as it turned from glossy black to salt-and-pepper (senior statesman) to dark and youthful again (the coming man, gearing up for elections).

Everyone has been very careful to ignore the elephant in the room, tiptoeing around that blessed hairpiece in case it jumps up and bites them. Now it’s got to a ridiculous stage. The bloody elephant fills the room and still we are pretending that it doesn’t exist. We are treating that wig as though it is a natural physical deformity that he was born with, and you must never mock people for their deformities. But it is not a deformity. It is a deliberate choice he has made to wear a rug on his head instead of stepping out bald like other men do.

Men who wear wigs are figures of fun. They have chosen to make themselves ridiculous, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be bullied into thinking otherwise. It is entirely normal and acceptable for men to be bald, but public life in Malta is littered with men in wigs. Without trying, I can think of at least three others besides our future prime minister. Where else does it happen? Nowhere – because elsewhere, men in wigs get mocked in the newspapers and on the comedy shows. We had the public embarrassment of a bewigged prime minister, and we all zipped our mouths and said nothing. If he wants to pretend he has hair, he is free to do so – but he shouldn’t expect the rest of us to pretend along with him. He’s not five years old (“Yes, Johnny, you’re a super-hero. But please don’t fly off the kitchen table.” “Yes, Dr Sant, of course you have hair. It would never occur to me to suggest otherwise.”)

If Alfred Sant is prime minister for 10 years, wig-management policy is going to be a big part of his portfolio. Dark hair at 60 is pushing it already. Over the next five years some serious decisions will have be taken, unless he wishes to be mistaken for one of those strange men who comb black Kiwi polish through their hair. The thing about wigs is that they don’t allow you to make the slow transition from dark to grey, mimicking nature, unless you have rather a lot of money to spend on a series of them that gradually turn white. Maybe he’ll surprise us all, and go for an old-lady blue rinse. That might make him marginally more exciting.

* * *

And then we’re surprised because young people aren’t interested, when what they are expected to be interested in is this – some old guy in a wig who’s been hanging around since 1987, and on the other side . . . oh God, don’t get me started on that.