There is no doubt that Labour is spoilt for choice when it comes to facing the post-Joseph Muscat era. I do not refer exclusively to the two contenders for the leadership, but to those scores of young men and women who, over the years, have benefited from various training courses and other initatives taken to ensure that the Party has a ready list of up-and-coming leaders in society. This was never more evident than in the 2017 elections, when so many young faces were winning local council and parliamentary seats.

This incredible yield of young talent will continue to bear fruit as the new leader emerges with, hopefully, his new vision for Malta after the horrors of the past few weeks. It is a deserved harvest, something the Nationalist Party had failed to prepare for at a time when it probably felt too comfortable in power and for so long. Otherwise it would not have felt the need to seek – and find – inspiration in off-party-machine pastures to fill the leadership post when Simon Busuttil rightly, if not exactly cheerfully, resigned after the 2017 electoral debacle.

That Adrian Delia eventually won the leadership race was hardly surprising, at least to me. He presented a very credible vision of a party ready to change and to remove the old guard, the old system of doing politics and the old us-vs-them mentality that, sadly, has plagued Maltese politics since politics were, well, invented. What is most unfortunate is the fact that, more than two years later, Delia is still caught in an ongoing process of internal turmoil which has forced him to dig more deeply into the almost solitary hole in which he has found himself.

Compare that to the serenity of the forthcoming change of the guard within Labour. Leadership contests, however, are never a velvet affair. There are bound to be cuts, scratches and scars, possibly even wounds that will eventually need time to heal, but the very fact that there is ample talent to choose from is a bonus only political foresight can guarantee.

Apart from the two-horse race, where you have the proven young talent of Robert Abela and Chris Fearne keenly going in for the job, a look at Labour’s current stable of MPs and three of its four MEPs will instantly show you the wisdom of political training as part of the continuous search for more ambitious young men and women to lead within communities and constituences. Malta probably has the youngest average-age government ever in her history. The same picture would emerge if you were to take into account the hundreds of young Labour councillors elected all over these Islands in 2017, and, even since then, the new crop of trainees.

Given that Labour still has almost three years to face before a general election, the obvious wealth of young talent is a privilege at a time when the going of late has been so tough. Transition in politics is painful, particularly at a moment in time when the party in process happens to be in power. It is what Boris Johnson must have been thinking when he took over No. 10 Downing Street from Theresa May for the UK Conservative Party last July. Today, less than four months later, he is unquestionably the Prime Minister in his own right.

There are brave young men and women who are willing to play their part in 21st-century Malta, but they may have come into adulthood thinking of politics as something to abhor. You can’t blame them, if they’ve given the history books enough of a good look, so they need to be enticed and given the opportunity to change things, to have a direct say – as the Vote at 16 gave them in local, national and European elections – and to add their own weight to the cause of generational ambitions.

Labour has had that foresight and is now exploiting it at an hour when it most needs it.

The logic of the moment                                        

If there truly is a conviction that flat-Earthers are on the rise and belief in a flat Earth is becoming fashionable, then is it any wonder we have once great nations being led by clowns everywhere? This has to be the logic of the moment.

According to reports, while scientists and other guardians of commonsense “are bemoaning this irrational development” (even here in Malta, on FaceBook), many are also looking at it as “a very useful indication of deeper societal problems.” Google Trends data, for example, says that searchers for “flat Earth” as a topic have increased considerably since 2014, particularly in the US, where they elected the biggest clown, while polls last year suggested that only 66 per cent of 18-to-24 and 25-to-34 year-olds “firmly believe” that our planet is round. Brazil has even hosted a flat-Earth conference in Sao Paulo while the Amazon burns.

To say it’s frightening is an understatement.

Honest hearts

I was struck by the story of a big-hearted Tehran taxi driver, Ali Hassan Zafari, who recently returned a bag containing €70,000 to a Polish couple who had left it behind them when they were visiting the Iranian capital. Zafari spent a long time trying to track them down when he could have just kept the money.

It instantly reminded me of a similar experience I once had in Skopje on my way to another city. I left my wallet in a taxi driven by a man who could only speak Macedonian. It did not contain as many thousands of Euros, of course, just a couple of hundred, but also all my credit cards. I had hardly reached the reception desk of my overnight hotel before the taxi driver came rushing in to return it. He even refused the cash I quickly offered in appreciation of his honesty.

There are still many good people out there.