Lejber, il-Partit tas-Seks – by H. P. Baxxter

Nude clubs, cold showers, hot saunas, a porn flick and a sausage and sauerkraut, soft sheets and firm beds, firmer butts, tits everywhere, and MMF threesomes. To this we have come.

I think we can honestly say that we knew it would come to this.

We’re not really shocked, are we? I mean if it was a Nationalist minister there would be public outcry and national shock. But Labour? We kind of expected it. This feeling is not one of shock, but of salacious voyeurism – go on, Labour, show us some more, show us how far you can go.

We knew it the moment Labour launched its election campaign. To understand how, let us go on a journey back in time. It all started with the Seven Deadly Sins. Joseph Muscat knew it, and wanted it to be this way. He knew the Maltese predilection for depravity. The desire. The hankering. The port-city lust and gluttony. The addiction to Pornhub. Is-seks.

It happens in any society which has modernity foisted upon it, instead of growing into it.Malta never had any eroticism, or any liberalism for that matter, which is why libertine and liberal are so often confused. There is no nude in “Maltese” art at least until the early 20th century. We never went through the Renaissance, with its celebration of the human body as the pinnacle of creation. We never had sensuous Baroque, with its emotional energy, its lyrical exploration of Olympus and its raptures and takings.

At best, we had staid Mannerism, and all crafted to a single purpose – La Religione. As for Romanticism, spare me. Rimbaud, Verlaine? You mean Dun Karm. Modern literature? You mean Li Tkisser Sewwi.

Take television. A nation’s TV is its vision of itself. The multiplication of TV channels (they gave it a heroic sheen and called it “pluralism in broadcasting” when it was just business), the explosion in advertising activity, the deluge of easy money – all this had one effect in Malta, and one effect only. It meant more TV series, several per channel, every day of the week – for years now.

In that self-referential, incestuous, small-island way, they are always about Maltese people doing Maltese things. And the plots always seem to revolve around sex. Never the explicit act, of course. Not for us – not yet, at any rate – the arthouse unsimulated penetration. We prefer the hint, the implied action, the bare shoulder and the sheet just above nipple height, or the crumpled sheets of the morning after. The Maltese deal with eroticism and sexuality as a child would deal with sweets in a sweet shop – by gorging themselves.

Labour have always had the monopoly on the sensual and the erotic. It’s a Leftist thing, and back in the early 1950s, Labour was Left. Now, of course, it isn’t left any more, but it started calling itself “Liberal and Progressive”.

All that Labour talent needed an outlet. In the 1960s and 70s it was the novels and plays which spawned a whole generation of Labour ribelli intelletwali, now all geriatrics, and comfortably settled in massively-paid jobs in the System, like Albert Marshall at the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts. As the 1980s drew closer they turned to television. Marshall’s Il-Madonna tac-Coqqa, featuring his wife Jane up a ladder with a priest looking up her miniskirt, was a massive hit. Mrs Marshall has come a long way since then: her most recent starring role was in the Labour Party’s Taghna Lkoll 2013 campaign video, telling us that she believes in Joseph.

In the 1990s they dropped all pretence at intellectualism and produced some classic amateur porn at the hallowed ‘Macina’, Labour’s historic headquarters, featuring the Labour Party’s own propaganda secretary, Stephen Ciantar, and the party’s cheerleaders, the PomPom Girls. The end of Alfred Sant’s leadership brought on a new PR and marketing consciousness. They had to be slick, or they would never be accepted.

But Labour’s grip on the nation’s erotic narrative is stronger than ever. Even when produced and broadcast on Net TV, the series look Labour. They feel Labour.

Labour’s billboards were full of young people bursting with positive energy – the quintessential shiny, happy people having fun. They are hip and cool, and trendy. They live life to the max. The music, the crowded party, the accidental brush, the hand on elbow, then round waist, and the final consummation, all under the benevolent rule of the Most Liberal Government in History. Jouissez sans entraves.

Those billboards screamed S.E.X.. It is, after all, what they’ve always been after. Once in government, they could fulfil their darkest fantasies. Big glass and concrete skyscrapers, skyscraper heels and fornication, cocaine and minibars, plenty of it, on the public purse wherever possible.

At the bottom of it, deeper than money, deeper even than power, deeper than the taking of it all, is the screwing. Among the officials in Malta’s government and Cabinet, and among the major players, how many are in a stable heterosexual relationship?

Go on, try it. You have to think really hard. Edward Scicluna, George Vella, and… Think of a name at random then. Nine times out of ten, they’re either gay or serial philanderers.

Is the entire Maltese government made up of sexual reprobates? Men who can’t keep their wick dry and women who get to the boardroom through the bedroom? At this point, I think the answer is a resounding yes. Money begets power, and power begets sex. Government begets more of everything. The restaurants, the bars, Level 22 and Hugo’s Lounge, the yachts, the playas, the players, kinky nerd nights at the Planetarium, foam parties and brothels.

Now that they have it all, where will they take us next?