My columnist friend at The Times, Kenneth Zammit Tabona, described their behaviour as being akin to that of a bunch of hysterical wet hens. I can’t come up with a more amusing or accurate description, so I’ll have to borrow his. The shenanigans of our government politicians, in the face of immigration issues, are nothing short of embarrassing. Clearly, the crisis is not one of immigration, but of leadership. Instead of flapping around like those wet and panicky chickens, our ministers should be calm and steadfast, sending out the message that they are in control of the situation and that there is nothing to worry about.

The ministers who are doing most of the clucking will probably read this and cluck some more: “It’s all right for her to sit at her keyboard and be an armchair critic.” If only that were so – watching them make a humiliating mess of themselves is actually rather painful. But there is a more fundamental point. Leadership is leadership, whether in the home, the family, the workplace, the village community, or an organisation. The qualities required are the same, as is the behaviour. Leaders should never be seen to panic. You can lock yourself into the bathroom and have a good old panic attack in private, but in front of those you are leading you must exude calm confidence and reassurance. What our ministers are doing is the equivalent of the managing director of a manufacturing company rushing onto the factory floor and shouting: “We’ve lost an important order. My God! My God! How are we going to find the money for wages next week! My God! How can we cope?” Then he picks up his telephone, and making sure that every one of the people on the floor can hear, begins begging and pleading with the company that cancelled the order. When the pleading doesn’t work, he tries getting tough; he may have lost the order but he doesn’t want the workers to think of him as a dublett (skirt), as Josie Muscat might put it.

Thank heavens we are in the European Union, because I would hate to find ourselves at war with this kind of leadership. Winston Churchill they certainly are not. Can you imagine the radio broadcasts? “Look, we told that Hitler, either you stop marching at Dunkirk or we’ll have to see about this. We really can’t take any more of these bombs. It’s too much. If things go on this way, we are going to run out of food and water, and then what will happen? People will starve, and it’s bad enough that they’ve been bombed out of their homes and have nowhere to live.” You have to hand it to the guys we’ve elected. They really know how to raise a person’s morale – to ankle-height.

Now I’m going to boss them around and tell them what to do, like a good armchair critic should. For heaven’s sake, stop telling the country in full lavatorial detail about your every piece of immigrant-negotiation with the other EU member states. That’s not diplomacy. Go off and do what you have to do, and stop bickering in public because it only causes stress and panic levels to escalate. You are presenting as a crisis something that is patently not one. Instead of letting the ignorant, uneducated and ill-informed among us know what a true crisis really is (oil supplies running out; a plague of cholera; a terrorist attack on our central power station; that influenza pandemic that has yet to materialise), you are treating this problem as though it is just such a crisis, and behaving as though you are dealing with Suez, the Cuban missile crisis, the destruction of the Twin Towers, or the first day of the Harrods sale. I feel like standing on my armchair and yelling: “Grow up, boys!”

It’s no wonder the people are panicking and speaking about invasion and running out of money when our leaders are talking and behaving like this. Do they have to release the text of each and every communication sent “to the EU” about this issue? Do they constantly have to bleat in public every time they have a bickering row with some official over the telephone? Do we want to know? No, we don’t. We just want to be reassured that our leaders are leading, and not squawking and flapping around the chicken-coop with the neighbour’s dog in hot pursuit.

* * *

And there’s another thing our government ministers should do while they’re about it. They should stop adopting the language of the ignorant populace and speaking about “the EU” as though Malta is not part of it, but still languishing on the outside listening to Alfred Sant whining about Switzerland in the Mediterranean. “The EU” means us too – or have we forgotten this? When I hear a government minister insist yet again that he told the EU this or that, and that the EU should help, I sigh with exasperation. I hear this all the time from people who can be forgiven for not knowing any better. I really don’t expect it from the government. How about rewording remarks to suggest the barest bit of awareness that Malta might actually be part of this EU we’re lobbying to help us? How about referring to “other member states of the EU” instead?

The blinkered vision of certain government ministers in their approach to this problem – problem, not crisis – exhausts me. I have to dredge up the energy to think about it, let alone write about it. Either they don’t get out much, or all the getting out they do is in environments that shelter them from reality. Do they know what a real problem is? I’m beginning to doubt it. They’re like a bunch of mummy’s boys who have finally found out that mummy didn’t tell them the truth about the world after all, and that it is really rather a nasty place with – dare I say the word? – problems.

Now Tonio Borg has come sulking back from a meeting of EU justice ministers in Luxembourg. He delivered a strong message there, or so a reporter reported, though to me it sounded like the ministerial equivalent of a woman yelling at her husband: “If you don’t stop leaving your boxers on the floor, I’m walking out,” and him saying, “What do you expect me to do? Cling to your ankles and say no, no, please don’t go? Leave then. Good riddance.” He said: “Let me make it clear to everyone. Malta will not allow itself to be anointed as the only sentinel of the EU’s southern borders.” Good thing all those other justice ministers are well brought up, or we would have heard the rude sounds made with their lips all the way here in Malta.

Someone should tell him that it’s bishops who are anointed, and not sentinels. Johnny comes home and tells his mother: “Hey, mum, I’ve just been anointed sentinel.” Sentinel? Where did he get that word, I wonder? A sentinel is just a look-out. Maybe he meant sentry, but that doesn’t make any sense either, because what we are objecting to is not looking out for immigrants or guarding against them, but rescuing them or – more pertinently – bringing them back home with us. So I think St Bernard dog would be more appropriate. “Look here,” Tonio Borg should have told his colleagues. “We are not going to be the St Bernard dog of the Mediterranean.” Or perhaps it’s just as well that he didn’t, because some wag might have called out: “And a good thing too, because you sure as hell aren’t the Switzerland of the Mediterranean.”

The newspapers told us that the response to our man’s “strong message” was lukewarm. Why am I not surprised? Each of the other EU member states is dealing with problems of its own – very serious problems, several of them even crises. Then they are forced to look at the man from Malta whinging on about a few hundred immigrants and demanding that others share the burden, and they probably want to tell him to go to hell and join the real world, the real world where running a country means coping with problems far greater than rescuing and feeding shipwrecked illegal immigrants.

There isn’t a single EU member state that hasn’t got problems with illegal immigration, and here come the whining Maltese, behaving as though illegal immigration was invented just for Malta. There are illegal immigrants pouring in to the EU from every point on its borders except the Atlantic coast, and even there hopeful immigrants are working their way in from Morocco to the tip of Spain and Portugal. Albanians have been pouring in to Greece and Italy for years. Bulgarians and Romanians, before they became part of the EU, were streaming in and making their way all over. Russians and Serbians are everywhere. The big cities of Europe are chock-a-block with Chinese. Almost all these people want to make their way to the United Kingdom as the ultimate pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. They try desperate measures to get in, including packing themselves into cargo containers for the trip across the channel between England and France.

Have any of these countries asked their fellow EU member states for help? Are they moaning in international forums? No, they’re not. They’re doing their level best to deal with it themselves, and they’re not without difficulties in respect of the citizens of their countries, either – far from it. Yet when public resentment grows, the leaders of those countries don’t yap, flap, squawk and blame “the EU”. They lead. They leave the flapping and squawking to the far right parties and the equivalent of the National Front.

I can’t understand why Malta wanted to join the EU as an equal, but then expects exceptions to be made in its case when there’s something it doesn’t like. We can’t expect to take an equal share of what’s positive, but a lesser share of what’s negative. Why should our fellow EU member states share Malta’s immigration burden when they don’t share the immigration burden of Britain, Italy, or Germany? Our perception that we need more help because “we’re small” is inane. If we’re big enough to join the EU as an equal member state, then we’re big enough to deal with our own problems.

This is what our ministers should be telling our people, but first they have to understand it themselves. If Britain helps to police our borders, then reciprocity will apply, and we will be expected to help police Britain’s borders and check the containers for suffocating Chinese. If Germany helps us, then Germany will also have to help Italy, Spain, Greece, and Cyprus. If they all club together and give us money to feed the immigrants – perhaps another saint could be inveigled upon to work a little miracle with some loaves and a couple of fishes – then we will have to do the same and give our share to our fellow member states to cope with their own immigration problems.

What we are doing is making a drama out of something that we should be looking at as a routine problem. For let’s face it, that’s what it has become: a routine problem. It’s not going to stop, there is no solution, so we have to change our melodramatic attitude. Either that, or we’ll just have to take Norman Lowell’s advice, and shoot the lot of them on sight.

A better solution would be to just grow up, and stop expecting others to solve our problems for us. That’s just a hang-over from the days of colonialism and Dom Mintoff. Our teenage years are long over. We’ll be 43 years old this summer, and old enough to know better. But maybe Malta is one of those middle-aged Maltese men who lives with his mother, who checks that he wears a vest and always gets his lunch ready.