The trouble with choosing as your party’s secretary-general a man who’s not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer is this: he’s going to row you up s**t creek and lose the paddle. And then he’ll blame everybody but himself. And so, confronted on Bondiplus with my column about Labour’s sad inadequacy in telling the country that its leader has cancer, and at a loss how to reply, Jason Micallef launched instead into a detailed description of all the bodywork he thinks I’ve had done.

I was absolutely thrilled. When you haven’t been chopped up, stretched, implanted fore and aft and injected with collagen, it’s one hell of a compliment to have it announced on prime-time television by the secretary-general of the Labour Party that you look like you have been. Before Monday night, I thought of myself as a greedy fat pig who piles on the pounds by troughing up enough food to feed an army of starving navvies, and hoovering up the butter – the real thing, not the stuff in tubs. By Tuesday morning, I was looking at myself in a new light and pulling a clingy number out of the wardrobe to wear to work. “That’s a very figure-hugging dress,” my husband remarked pointedly. “Is it wise?” I told him that I was hoping to run into Jason Micallef and make his day, though I wouldn’t be inviting him to cop a feel of the real thing like Doubting Thomas was.

When you’re 43 and wondering where the girl in the tiny bikini has gone because she definitely isn’t in the mirror, it’s very gratifying to think of the Labour Party sitting around trying to work out which part of your chassis you’ve had fixed so that they can use this information to counter your arguments about their myriad failures. Do they use a whiteboard and diagrams, do you think? (“Ara, Jase, x’tahseb?”) I’d have loved to have been there when they discussed what our Jason so wonderfully referred to as my warrani, which translates literally as ‘backside’. So thanks for the mammaries, Jase. You’ve cheered me up enormously and shored up my deep belief in the magical powers of butter.

* * *

While I sat watching Jason tangle himself up in knots, one of my sons walked into the room: “Aw, ma – who’s the used-car salesman?” Before long, there was an unusually large audience round the television, watching Jason make a pig’s dinner of explaining why we weren’t allowed to know that Alfred Sant has cancer. Delightfully, his blustering hogwash included generous doses of pidgin. We got to know about il-lider’s “bondage kbira ma’ ommu”, and about the many ‘dinner-denses’ that Jason was obliged to attend over Christmas instead of his indisposed boss. He looked so pleased to have been asked to do battle on the drinks circuit, buffet-plate in hand. At one point, while demonstrating his new-found expertise in oncology, he declared that not all cancers are “fatal like Dr Sant’s”. I wondered briefly whether it was deliberate strategy, a Freudian slip, or just plain stupidity. When his host asked him whether he really meant to say that, he trod right in and said that yes, he did. Then he became lost in his own argument and you could see him thinking: “Now where am I going with this?”

* * *

Let’s imagine the scene at Labour HQ when they decided to send Jason to speak for the party at a pivotal point in its development. “Bondiplus tonight guys! They’re going to be invading our leader’s privacy and discussing his cancer. We’ve got to send in one of our best men.” Silence, then: “I know. Let’s send Jason Micallef. He really knows how to think on his feet and build a good argument. Partnership won the referendum and we can win this one, boys.” And the rest is history.

* * *

Alfred Sant gave that press conference last Monday afternoon to take the wind out of the sails of the programme later that evening. He also did it to show us just how fighting fit he is. It was a bad mistake, because it showed precisely that, and no amount of make-up could conceal the ghastly pallor. He should have stayed in bed and let his doctor-candidate do the talking.

Jason the sidekick, asked why Sant persists in the leadership of his party when he is fighting cancer, spoke about heroism. Yet none of the factors which make for heroism are present. Malta in 2008 is not Burma. Lawrence Gonzi is not Idi Amin or Vladimir Putin or even Dom Mintoff or Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in the early 1980s. An opposition leader fighting for freedom and justice while battling cancer would be considered a hero and attract popular support, votes and admiration. But this is a trouble-free member State of the European Union, and an opposition leader who refuses to step down despite having cancer, when he is entirely replaceable by any one of a number of equally inept individuals who are gagging to take his place, is seen only as somebody determined to have one last shot at achieving his personal ambition, even if it means taking his party down with him.

Those who think that Sant will get the sympathy vote because he is so ill are seriously misjudging the situation. People don’t choose their prime minister on the basis of pity, and speaking generally, most people would prefer not to have a prime minister with cancer, so why would they choose one? Being diagnosed while you’re in power is one thing; being diagnosed and then asking people to make you prime minister is another thing altogether. If there are any brains sitting around Sant, then they must realise that their leader’s illness has given people one more reason not to vote for him. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t a chance of scraping in by the skin of his teeth, but that chance has been reduced further, though the mood could change.

* * *

Please let’s stop all this rubbish about being sensitive. If Sant, his friends, family and cohorts want sensitivity, then there is one sure-fire way to get it: retiring from the leadership and convalescing in private. Nobody who is trying hard to become prime minister could seriously expect to be handled with kid gloves, no matter how ill he is. If he’s ill enough to need sensitive treatment, then he’s too ill to fight an election, and certainly too ill to be prime minister.

Sant has decided to stay in the arena. We have been told several times that he is determined to fight the election. While he’s in the arena, he can’t demand that his opponents use rubber-tipped weapons or no weapons at all. The Labour Party is ridiculous to imagine that its leader can fight an election cocooned in a protective sheath of sensitivity. It is absolutely absurd to demand that we be kind to him because he is a sick man. If he’s too sick to take the fight, then what is he doing in the arena?

* * *

When I listen to Labour, I get the sense of having stepped through Alice’s looking-glass into a land of feints and shadows and a language called Jabberwocky. Charles Mangion, who is acting as leader during the boss’s post-operative rest, is a very nice chap to talk to, but as a politician he just doesn’t cut the mustard. Talking to supporters at Rabat, he made the mistake of saying that Labour is the party of opportunity, while the Nationalists are the party of opportunism. Oh, Jabberwocky. It’s the other way round.

The Labour government that I and tens of thousands of others remember was a government of outrageous opportunism, and the only individuals who did well in that climate were outrageous opportunists. As a child, teenager and young adult of the Labour years, I can assure Dr Mangion that we lived a life completely devoid of opportunity except for the rare opportunity to escape from Malta by taking desperate measures and becoming illegal immigrants.

The years 1996 to 1998 were hardly the Opportunity Years, either. Opportunism got Alfred Sant and his baggy suit into government, and opportunism hurtled that government from one crisis to another, until it finally failed in one big bout of opportunism down at the Birgu waterfront. I scan my memory for the great opportunities being offered to young people and businesses in those years, and I come up with zilch. The only opportunity that people found in 1998 was the opportunity to get rid of the rod they’d made for their own backs. They tripped over themselves to snatch at it.

Malta’s years of opportunity were these: 1987 to 1996 and 1998 to the present. I don’t say this because I’m a diehard Nationalist, as the Jabberwocky Labour media like to misrepresent me. I’m anything but. With both my parents coming from families of Stricklandjani, I grew up without political loyalties and simply looked around me and decided what was best. It was the easiest decision I ever made. I can’t for the life of me understand how Charles Mangion, with a straight face, describes the Labour years as years of opportunity, and the recent past, in which Malta prospered, young people got to do anything they pleased, investment poured into the country and the country joined the European Union, as years in which opportunity was absent.

There was more Jabberwocky talk from Dr Mangion: that a Labour government will make sure of the equal distribution of wealth, because under this government only a few are well-off. Oh really? So Charles Mangion looks about him and thinks: “Hmmmmm, look at all these poorly-dressed people driving clapped-out Skodas and buying the barest necessities from one of the only 10 shops on the island because they’re all registering for work. I can’t believe how far downhill Malta’s gone since 1987.” Maybe it’s because Charles and the Labour Party think that progress happens despite the government, rather than because of it. As somebody who lived through 16 years of Dom and Karmenu, and another two years of Fred, I know for a fact just how much a government can do to s***w up a country and the lives of the people who live there. And we know, too, if we’re neither brainwashed by our upbringing or short on the grey matter, that it’s the directional policies of the government, and not sheer chance or luck, that have made Malta what it is over the past few years.

So come on, Charles, get a grip. You need to be reminded that it was under the Labour government of the 1970s and 1980s (there was no time for the making of favourites during the late 1990s blip) that wealth was parcelled out to the few, some of whom were senior members of the government and the rest their friends and bazuzli. Now, all those who want to do so can earn a decent living, get an education, better their opportunities, or build a life, no matter what kind of background they come from or what their parents do for a living or who their friends are. The Labour Party can’t stomach the fact that it’s been the Nationalists who have bettered the lot of the working-classes and given them middle-class aspirations and even middle-class lives. We’ve had a government that has made it possible for all those who want to better themselves to do so. As for those who don’t want to better themselves – well, there’s little any government can do about them.

Don’t try to rewrite history, please, Dr Mangion, because you’re talking to people who lived through it then and who are living here right now, with eyes in their heads and brains between their ears.

* * *

And as if to contradict his claim that Labour is the party of opportunity not opportunism, Charles Mangion repeated to his Rabat gathering the boast that a Labour government will not tax income from overtime work. This appears to be the one cactus growing in Labour’s policy desert. Its spokespeople bang on about it relentlessly, while seemingly at a loss to explain what else might tempt us to vote for them.

It is exactly the same well-worn opportunistic tactic the party used in 1996 (“we’ll remove VAT”) and in 2003 (“partnership not membership”). Then when push came to shove, we found out that the removal of VAT was a unilateral decision taken at the 11th hour by a leader who dropped it on his party like a bomb. They hadn’t got a clue how to replace VAT, and spent months creating CET while business was thrown into chaos and the finance minister blew a gasket and resigned. And we all know the story with partnership: how the Labour Party went about conning its followers into believing that it could arm-wrestle the whole of the European Union into creating a special partnership for pin-prick Malta, while EU spokespeople denied through a megaphone that this was in any way possible. In 1998, Alfred Sant was so damned hysterical about “blah-blah-blah bic-cinturin tal-bokkla” that the only opportunistic tactic he could come up with was “we’ll remove Dom Mintoff”.

Now here we go again. Picture the Labour Party policy meeting. “Any bright ideas, boys?” asks the lider. “I know: let’s remove income tax,” says one of the many who are fighting like ferrets in a sack to replace him. “Then where do we get the money to run things?” asks the woman in the back row. “Why don’t we go halfway and tell them that we’ll remove income tax on overtime earnings?” says the ferret. “But then they’ll all go on the minimum wage and have the rest paid in overtime,” says the woman in the back row. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” says the lider. “Promises first, plans and systems later. The priority is to get into government. First I’m going to concentrate on becoming prime minister; then I’ll work out what to do when I get there. Meanwhile, let’s dispatch Charles Mangion to Rabat to tell people that Labour is the party of opportunity not opportunism.”

Dear heaven, what a mess.