Everybody is talking about the YouTube video that’s doing the rounds by email, the one in which our future prime minister wears a wig fashioned after the hair of a Playmobil man and talks like somebody whom the bouncers are about to eject from a bar.

I sent it to one of my sisters who had been away for some time, as a welcome-home present, but it bounced back. I phoned to let her know and she said thank God she never got it. “That’s the last thing I feel like seeing,” she said. “I can’t stand the way things go in this country. Thousands of people are sending that video to each other or downloading it from YouTube, but do you see a single article about it in the newspapers? No, you don’t. And this is the man who’s planning to run the country that we’re talking about.”

She’s right. I wrote my first column, way back in 1990, because I was heartily sick of opening the newspaper to find that it didn’t reflect what people were doing, saying or thinking, and that it avoided certain subjects. Now here we go again. The leader of the opposition, with his stupid wig and his other problem, has become the Big Taboo. What other problem, I hear the more innocent among you ask. Well, there you go. You don’t know because the newspapers are not doing their job properly, and in among that lot I include myself, even though I’m a columnist and not a staff reporter or a full-time journalist.

People don’t write about the sheer ludicrousness of that Playmobil wig because they say it’s bad taste. – not the wig, that is, but talking about it. Rubbish! I’m not about to start taking lessons in taste from people who have never had any, nor is “good taste” to be confused with cowardice and conservatism. “Good taste” is just an excuse for not facing up to the fact that we have a ridiculous and embarrassing leader of the opposition, who is going to be a ridiculous and embarrassing prime minister.

The reactions of some people to any mention of that Playmobil-toy wig makes me wonder when baldness in men started to be seen as some kind of grave affliction, like cancer, with bald men having to be treated with compassion as objects of pity. Billions of men the world over are bald. That’s normal. What isn’t normal, on the other hand, is the urge to wear a wig to pretend that you’re not. If we are going to pity the future prime minister for anything, it’s for the weakness of character that leaves him unable to face the world without it. There’s more: the curious psychology whereby you wear a wig to pretend that you’re not bald while at the same time being acutely aware that it’s an obvious wig, that everyone knows it’s a wig, and that they know you’re bald. Hence, the wig draws attention to the very thing you are trying so hard to disguise, and becomes the unspoken elephant in the room.

So why do it? It’s precisely this that is cause for concern: not the wig itself, but his need to wear it, and what that says about him. If you think a wig is a wig is a wig, like a hat is a hat is hat, or a tie is a tie is a tie, and that one is no more significant than the other, then please rush out and buy a few books, because you really need some lessons in psychology. Remember that Tony Blair developing a need to wear foundation, powder and mascara, even when not on television, was as great a contributing factor to his downfall as any other. His dependency on make-up was widely discussed in the London newspapers, which routinely described him as the “orange man”. Newspapers even asked – and were given – details of the amounts of money he spent on make-up in a given year, out of the public purse.

Perhaps those who pranced as though they’d sat on a pin-cushion because I “overstepped the boundaries” by mentioning the Great Unmentionable Wig (GUW) need a short explanation as to why this is. It’s because it is not normal, in European society, for heterosexual men who are not involved in the arts to go out in public wearing make-up, unless they are about to feature on television under strong lighting. A woman prime minister would get no questions about make-up, nor would she be pilloried, or her psychology questioned, for wearing it. That is why the woman who wrote in to ask whether I would mock a woman who had gone bald for wearing a wig was so crazily off the wall. It is not normal for women to go bald, and therefore it is socially acceptable for bald women to wear wigs. Also, women who go bald, precisely because it is not normal but an affliction, are to be considered with delicacy and compassion. Baldness in men is not an affliction and does not demand compassion. God help us if it did. I would never dream of mocking a woman in a wig, but conversely, a man in a wig is there to be pilloried if he is in public life. And if he isn’t in public life, then who cares? He can wear a purple wig and a spotted clown suit and hang from a branch and sing Taxi Mary, for all I or anyone else might give a damn. I am amazed at finding myself having to explain such simple things, which should be obvious. Where on earth am I living? Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and the Maltese are from Pluto.

Another woman wrote in to say that a man has as much “right” to wear a wig as I have to wear a bra or dye my hair. Well, I hate to disappoint her, but I rarely bother with a bra, and I don’t dye my hair. What rights have to do with this, I don’t know, but I had better point out here and now that garbled logic belongs on Pluto. A man who wears a wig is marginally less questionable than a man who wears a bra – only marginally, though. If the once-and-future prime minister were to decide to begin wearing a Wonderbra tomorrow, are all these people going to defend his “right” to do so, or are they going to wake up to what I am talking about here? Maybe they’ll say it’s different, because a man doesn’t “need” a bra. Precisely. Spot on. A man doesn’t need a wig, either. Baldness is normal in men past their late 20s. Wigs are for women.

Bear with me a moment. Bad taste is refusing to accept that you’re bald, wearing something stolen from the Playmobil man catalogue of fashion on your head, and then forcing people into the embarrassing situation of pretending that it doesn’t exist. Good taste would be not wearing it. Bad taste is going out in front of a crowd of tens of thousands when you are in no fit state to do so, and embarrassing yourself and your political party. If you want to know exactly what I mean, check out that video. I don’t usually bother with these things, but this one really upset me – not because it revealed to me new things about the man that had not already been obvious to me for years, but because it reminded me that I live in a country where the mechanisms of public debate and the media do not function properly. If they did, we would not have reached the situation in which a man in that shoddy state stood up in front of a mass meeting and addressed it as Malta’s potential prime minister. This is what we have come to.

I’m not speaking about Labour versus Nationalist here. You can see from that video that the crowd in front of the leader of the opposition was disturbed by his performance and didn’t quite know how to react or what to make of it. We know how his colleagues reacted because a few of them made their concerns known to journalists. I am not one of those who are grateful that he is the leader of the opposition because his presence weakens and damages the Labour Party, but rather the opposite. I do not want the Labour Party damaged and weakened, but strengthened, because a strong opposition and alternative government is vital to the proper functioning of a democracy. The Labour Party realises that it is not the thought of a Labour government that is off-putting to thousands of people, but the thought of this oddly-behaved, oddly-spoken man as prime minister.

The unfortunate thing about that video is that it juxtaposes clips of the prime minister with clips of the potential prime minister. We could have done without the comparison. We didn’t need a comparison with the prime minister’s even-tempered, good-natured normality to show that the opposition leader’s behaviour wasn’t normal up on that stage. Or perhaps I’m wrong, and we do. Perhaps things have got so badly out of hand in public life in Malta that we need reminding what normal is. Maybe we don’t even know normal when it socks us in the face. I’ll tell you what the leader of the opposition’s performance reminded me of: that mass meeting four years ago, just before the referendum or the general election that followed it, in which he addressed a similarly perplexed and disconcerted crowd in an almost identically strange fashion. Even off the television – and I was watching Super One not NET – I could pick up the atmosphere of weird negativity, and the palpable confusion of the crowd.

As for Dr Sant’s other little problem, I’m not quite sure why we’re not allowed to discuss it. Libel suits, perhaps? Hardly – there are libel suits flying about all over the place in this potty little island, largely because people have a disproportionate sense of their own importance, and because they cannot understand that public life lays you open to public scrutiny, and even – oh, horrors – to mockery and laughter. Maybe the media and public debate don’t function properly here because lots of people don’t understand that these are vital functions of a democracy. Instead, they think like the French do, and we all know that the French didn’t develop democracy naturally, but instead had it foisted upon them by means of a shockingly bloody revolution. We, too, had democracy foisted upon us, and we still don’t know how it works, or what precisely to do with it. We think it’s all about parliamentary elections, full stop. Our leader of the opposition would never have been a possibility in Britain. Go on, ask yourself why. Or maybe reasoning that one out is too much to expect of somebody who can’t distinguish between the different status of a once-and-future male prime minister and a woman afflicted with alopecia or hair-loss following cancer treatment.

I think the real reason we don’t openly discuss our worries about the Leader of the Opposition is because of fear that once we prise off the lid of that particular Pandora’s box, we don’t know what might pop out and bite us. So it’s a case of “better say nothing”, leave the problem unspecified and not discussed, and instead pass around an email with a YouTube video that leaves you in no doubt what the problem really is. Oh, and we can always use lots of euphemisms, like “worse for wear” – my favourite – and “tired and emotional”, which a columnist used yesterday in another news-paper.

And now a fitting ending for the people from Pluto: that’s all, folks! Oh sorry, that’s Bugs Bunny from Hanna Barbera, not Pluto from Disney. Or maybe it should be Freddie from Playmobil.