On Republic Day – along with most of Malta, it seemed – we went to Valletta to do a spot of Christmas shopping.

Milling around the shops, we suddenly found ourselves at the tail-end of the official Republic Day celebrations. The result was a study in incongruity.

While we were going round the stalls at Il-Monti, an impeccably dressed new Labour MP, with his wife/partner, came round the corner and breached the crowd. He stood out not only because he is a tall and well-built man but also because his suit was a far cry from the ordinary garb we were all wearing.

Then, in Archbishop’s Street, we had to run the gauntlet between the shiny cars of the ambassadors and other guests, the parked motorcycles of the police outriders and the guests emerging from The Palace.

The latter included people with whom I mix in my ordinary work and with whom I am on friendly terms but, strangely enough, they passed within two feet from me and just did not see me. Their eyes seemed to have been programmed to weed out people wearing ordinary clothes and see just those in suits.

I am sure there was nothing intentional in this but there was this disconnection between the people wearing suits and ordinary folk, each going his own way and not coming to any point of conjunction that I could see.

Things were slightly better on the other side of St George’s Square in the posh shops where the suits, who were present here as well, did not stand out so much.

To most, this might seem a song and dance about an insignificant matter or something that has always been that way or maybe something that was actually quite worse up to a year ago. I genuinely would not know.

I must admit, however, that I was aghast at how so many people we normally look up to can be so blinkered where fellow human beings are concerned. Many of these, then, are politicians – people who depend on ordinary folk and who, time and again, come to our homes to fish for our votes. That should possibly make them tuned in to people and their needs but this experience – and not just this – seems to indicate that they suffer from a peculiar kind of amnesia or people-blindness in-between the five-yearly spells.

Over in Italy, just across the sea, the situation used to resemble the one here, but it has degenerated quite badly.

One reason why Italy is in its deepest crisis for a generation or more is because this gap between the government and the governed has deepened and widened so much that it is now well nigh unbridgeable.

Ironically, what we have many times wished for ourselves here: the elimination of the chasm between one side and the other, has greatly contributed to the situation that has developed.

There was, some 60 years ago, the deep chasm between the Christian Democrats and the Communists. Then came Aldo Moro, and the Centro-Sinistra was born. The distinctions between right and left became blurred. Then devolution set in and provinces, regions and other intervening levels of authority were set up.

In time, Italy found itself saddled with many levels of a devoluted authority and this, with all its trappings: the ‘auto blu’ of anybody in authority, the MPs with all the freebies they enjoy, has resulted in a stranglehold on the ailing economy.

In recent times, Italians have stopped voting for the politicians they prefer and instead now vote for the parties and it is the parties that choose the MPs.

This has pushed the MPs up even higher, aloof from the people, living in a Byzantine world of their own, cosseted and defended at a huge cost to the nation.

When Mario Monti first, and later Enrico Letta, tried to redress things and improve the economic situation through the imposition of austerity measures, the people rose up in rebellion.

First there was Beppe Grillo and his 5 Stelle (or rather, before that there was Umberto Bossi and his Lega) and he had seemed like a trial-blazing star when he obtained the support of a quarter of the electorate at the last election. And now we have this Forconi movement (pitchforks), which is actively seeking confrontation with the police and the troops, even to the point of making the latter take off their helmets when they face demonstrators.

Italy is quickly becoming ungovernable and its problems are becoming intractable. Serious electoral reform could provide a solution, but this is becoming increasingly impossible to bring about.

Of more concern is the fact that people have just given up on politicians of any and every hue. That is, in essence, what the 5 Stelle and the Forconi are all about. They are not perceived as having the solution for the country’s problems but, worse, they are seen as the actual problem itself.

We are nowhere this point. For all that people may mutter, and whatever the results of the past nine months of the new administration, there is much to say for a clean alternation of power rather than the huddle-muddle of Italian politics, where everyone ends up, time and again, as a winner.

But politicians of all persuasions must understand that, just as being isolated and cut off from the people brought down Lawrence Gonzi’s administration, so too being isolated and not seeing the people at all will bring down any other administration. People have become used to not being seen at all, except in the last few months, and they have also become used to paying back those who treat them so badly.

Whatever people may think of them, the great politicians of the past were those whose eyes were constantly open to the ordinary people around them and, even if they were surrounded with the trappings of power, this was always with the knowledge that power had been given to them by the people and the people could just as easily take it away.

In our times, politicians have taken to sit on the front seat of their luxury cars as if this, on its own, established them as people “of the people” – when it did nothing of the sort.

I almost forgot to mention: just before witnessing what I described at the beginning of this article, I spied Austin Gatt sitting on a stool near a bar in Merchants Street. People passed by and, as far as I could see, no one went to speak to him. A year or two ago he would have been surrounded by a crowd of back-slapping, adoring sycophants. Such is power: something that is easily removed from under you.

It is bad, always and everywhere, when ordinary people are looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.

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