I see that the Labour Party is going down the road of producing people from the woodwork to say why they no longer love the Nationalist Party, why they feel betrayed or let down, and why they have turned to Labour for the limelight.

It’s a well-worn set of railroad tracks, much used by those of a totalitarian disposition: find a couple of chaps who have seen the light and parade them before the public like a perambulating circus act. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. It only makes the Labour Party seem as desperately misguided as the individuals who end up making a spectacle of themselves by grinding their axe in public.

It’s a little bit odd of the Labour Party to expect voters to float in its direction because Jo Said and Michael Woods have condemned and criticised the Nationalists. If you want people to have influence, you first have to make sure they have credibility and are known to the public. Lino Spiteri resigning from Sant’s cabinet – now that had an impact on the public’s perception of a political party, as did Dom Mintoff running Sant down during an hours-long parliamentary speech.

I’ve condemned and criticised the Nationalist Party too, but Labour doesn’t wave me around like a winning ace. I wonder why. Among other things, it’s probably because I don’t have the adult equivalent of the primary-school mentality that reacts to real or perceived slights with “I’m not your friend anymore”, followed by a rapid rush into the embrace of a new best friend.

I think that people let themselves down when they behave like this. There is no dignity in the situation. It reminds me too much of those abandoned wives – or husbands, for that matter – who rail relentlessly against the departed spouse, oozing hurt from every pore, then try to damage the spouse in any way they can, sometimes even taking on a new lover in whom they’re not interested, in a vain attempt at making the spouse jealous enough to say: “Let’s get back together again.” You watch; you listen, and then you know that this is all about unrequited love. We try to damage the love-object who fails to love us adequately in return.

Nobody is immune: look at Nicolas Sarkozy, parading before the world’s media with Carla Bruni and carrying her son on his shoulders. It doesn’t take extraordinary insight into human nature to understand that there is only one target audience for this choreographed performance: the woman who divorced him after having an affair with a very attractive man called Richard Attias, whom she described as “the only one I have ever truly loved”. Nor does it take much more insight into human nature to realise that her only possible reaction to all this is to think even less of her tiresome ex-husband than she does already.

Just as the Sarkozy story is full of dubious holes because a passionate obsession with the same woman for 20 years does not become, overnight, a passionate obsession with another one (and if it does, there are questions to be raised about psychological stability), so it is with people who switch from one party to another as though they are changing overcoats.

Support for a political party is not like support for a band club, or at least, it shouldn’t be. It demands thought, consideration of what that party stands for, sympathy with the fundamental principles that underpin its policies, agreement with the policies themselves. When the two main political parties are so very different – and yes, they are, despite the attempts of Alternattiva Demokratika to portray them as a homogenous monolith – switching from one to the other demands an entire reversal of principles and values. For a person who voted Nationalist (sound economy, the phenomenal growth of new areas of business, EU membership, vanishing unemployment, burgeoning foreign direct investment) to suddenly turn around and say “Now I’m Labour” (a long history of confusion, confused thinking, bad governance, lack of direction and chaos) means that he has rejected all these real, concrete positives in favour of the magic shadows and promises of the Labour Party. This means that the person prefers to have faith in what might be rather than in what is.

People who turn and spin in the political wind are like men who move from one woman to another, each time claiming they have found their one true love until the next one comes along. In the end, you just can’t take them seriously. With every change they make, they lose credibility among their peers and end up a joke – a nice joke, but still a joke.

The Labour Party has tried it on, too, with Ray Bondin and Carmel Cacopardo. Ray Bondin made it clearly immediately that he now considers himself a private citizen who doesn’t wish to be dragged into the current imbroglio. He has been out of politics, in other words, as long as Alfred Sant has been leader of the Labour Party – 16 years, long enough for a newborn baby to grow into an A-level student. Carmel Cacopardo has had his tiffs with the Nationalist Party over the years, and so there is nothing new there.

The saddest aspect of all this is that the Labour Party has seized on these two individuals, Michael Woods and Jo Said, without even making enquiries as to where they might be coming from. In the best of circumstances, that’s ill advised. In the run-up to an electoral campaign, it’s madness. Before holding somebody up as a poster-boy, researching their background is a good idea. Charles Mangion, who was acting leader of the party when Mr Said began to be championed, said on BondiPlus last Monday that he doesn’t know him from Adam, that he doesn’t know anything about him at all. But people cannot be complete unknowns in tiny communities like Malta. Out there among the television audience there are going to be lots of people who do know Jo Said, who knew him when he was at school, kicking around as a teenager, a young adult, who he married, what he did for a living, where he lived before where he lives now. He might be a well-respected paragon, but then again, he might not.

Like Charles Mangion, I know little or nothing about this man, apart from the fact that he suddenly appeared on the social scene a year or so ago, and that first he was nowhere and suddenly he was everywhere. He had obviously returned from wherever he had been living for however many years – quite a great many years, I imagine, given that I have been all over the place for the last 20 years and never once met him before last summer – and was looking for a new role for himself. Now it has been revealed that he wanted to become chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority, as though these are appointments you can simply walk up and demand of the government. Nobody knew that, but his very odd behaviour in the embrace of the Labour Party has forced its revelation. Surely he must have foreseen that? The Labour Party, on the other hand, did not have a clue about this. Charles Mangion was befuddled when presented with the information on television last Monday. The Labour Party doesn’t like this, of course, because it makes their convertito look like an axe-grinder.

A really good convertito catch for the Labour Party would be the very prominent businessmen it has portrayed as associated with the Nationalist Party or government: George Fenech, for example, Marin Hili or Nazzareno Vassallo. These are people who are respected for their business acumen and for their achievements. But here’s the rub. If they were to take to the stage to declare their disappointment in and disillusionment with the Nationalist Party, they would suffer a massive decline in credibility. The credibility that the Labour Party might have wished to appropriate for itself, through them, would be dissipated immediately. Whether you support the Labour Party or the Nationalist Party, the natural human instinct is to be wary of people who switch banners too easily, and to wonder what really made them do it.

I am quite sure that there aren’t very many Labour supporters going around saying “Anke dak Jo Said jghid kontrihom fil-pubbliku.” For a start, not one of them will have a clue who he is, which is why the Labour Party has found it necessary to describe him before every public appearance as a former supporter of the Nationalists. And for afters, the only thing they’ll be wondering about is what his real problem is. Labour supporters are not the ones whom the party is trying to reach out to in any case, because that’s wasted effort. The party is trying to reach out to people like me, to people from Sliema and Swieqi and St Julian’s who endlessly repeat that they need a change (yes, a change to Sant). And here’s the thing that the Labour Party misses completely in this whole debacle: these are the very people most likely to know Jo Said – not me, but his contemporaries, certainly. They are not going to be impressed, just as I and my contemporaries will fail to be impressed if one of our old school-friends, who spent half a lifetime living outside Malta, were to return to the island to dedicate time to slagging off the government and playing into the hands of Labour. We wouldn’t want to follow that person. On the other hand, we would think he needs rescuing from further embarrassment – which, incidentally, is exactly what I think about Jo Said, despite having met him only two or three times. It isn’t the Nationalist Party he’s let down; it’s himself.