We are just two weeks into the election campaign, and after a blitzkrieg of mixed marketing tactics, things are already tipping into ridicule for Labour.

When people begin laughing at your campaign, it’s time to worry. When they see your big cartoon iPhones in every town square and on every church parvis, and want to knock them over in irritation, it’s time you sat back and had a good think. And when they watch your special advertising feature at the cinema and boo and hiss, then you know you’re doing something really wrong.

The impression I’m left with is that Labour ran through the marketing tactics supermarket with a big trolley, grabbing what it could indiscriminately, after having won one of those competitions where you get to run through the aisles for 20 minutes taking what you can and not having to pay for it.

Their campaign is a mess, and whoever thinks it is brilliant has been blinded by the blitz. Yes, individual tactics are good, some are sound and others are well-targetted. But there’s just too much of it. Overall, it’s overkill. It’s not a campaign. It’s minestra.

Whoever came up with all the different tactics and wrapped them into Labour’s single strategy wrote Malta’s tiny size right out of the equation. Things that would work in a big city, a huge country, do not work on two small islands. The same people go everywhere. In the course of a single day, we might Labour false-phones in 10 different locations. Then we go to watch a film and are forced to look at Narcy Calamatta – a man people of my generation simply do not appreciate at all – telling us why we shouldn’t fear change.

We open our newspaper and a giant colour supplement falls out, with Cyrus Engerer’s face on it. We turn on the television and Joseph Muscat is standing on a stage designed for a rock concert by U2, and above and beneath him there are three, yes three, huge banners with JOSEPHMUSCAT.COM writ large. He, too, is telling us that we should not fear change. But it’s not change we fear. It’s him and his troupe. We don’t think he has good judgement at all (ref EU membership, Cyprus, Iceland, supporting Labour when it was led by Sant, supporting Labour at all) and we think he’s not really speaking the truth. Nor does he speak with passion, which means he has no feeling for what he claims are his views.

The tipping-point for many people, the point at which they began to mock Labour’s campaign outright, was the Obama rip-off video produced with the help of Mario Philip Azzopardi, a film-maker who has not lived in Malta since the late 1970s. He stars in his own video and tells us that he wants Malta to be taghna lkoll. Four decades in Toronto and he hasn’t noticed that it’s not only Malta that’s ours, but the whole of the European Union, and no thanks to JosephMuscat.com who told us to, and I quote him precisely, “vote No, deface your ballot-sheet, or place your voting document in a frame.”

That Obama rip-off video has really got on a lot of people’s nerves. I try to understand why exactly, and I can’t. There’s lots more, and so much more serious matters, that should perturb us about Joseph Muscat and his scary party, so why is it the sight of friends and family of Labour Party and Super One people, behaving like idiots on a video, be the thing to bother us?

Maybe it’s because it was just the last straw after two weeks of stunts and magic tricks, which began when Muscat waddled up to a large poster outside Labour HQ and signed it with a flourish at midnight, while party officials and members of the press-pack stood and shivered in the biting wind.

But it cannot be the last straw, because we have another almost seven weeks to go. Labour’s war-chest is filled to overflowing, which means that there is a great deal more in store. We have been told already that this includes videos, also produced by Mario Philip Azzopardi. They will, because of his involvement, be technically perfect. But the content will be dated, out of touch with today’s realities, and as a consequence of that, utterly idiotic.  Azzopardi isn’t producing videos for Malta in 2013. He’s producing them for the Malta he left in 1976. Hence all the talk of nationhood and our forefathers, when what we want is the future and the European Union.