If you want it to be sexy, Saviour, just stand aside

Model agent Carina Camilleri gave a big interview to The Sunday Circle magazine in which she describes how she told Saviour Balzan that the vote against spring-hunting is not interesting to young people, and he told her: “YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT SEXY.”

Does he not realise that he is the single greatest obstacle to the No campaign being perceived as sexy?

Here’s another piece of unsolicited advice. Carina Camilleri has clearly fallen prey to the dangerous temptation (it happens to us all) of extrapolating from your own circle of friends and peers.

In any form of campaigning, this is a disaster.

The young people Mrs Camilleri habitually meets are among the least likely to take any kind of interest at all in current affairs, politics or environmentalism.

There are plenty of other kinds of young people who are very interested and who are motivated to vote, either one way or the other. But they are not going to listen to a model agent and an angry newspaper owner, both of them old enough to be their parents.

A woman in her 50s can’t make things sexy for teenagers and people in their 20s. Mrs Camilleri should face it (I certainly have): we’re their mothers’ age, and even beyond that where teenagers are concerned. And Saviour Balzan can’t make things sexy for anyone at all.

The mistake in this campaign – the hunters are doing it too – is that the young people are stuck at the back like decorative items or turkey trimmings, seen but not heard. They need to be out in front, speaking.