Panic. The other day I brought out the lawn mower with a view to giving my beard a long overdue trim, and… Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Is that a white hair?

Yes, indeed. There it was, grinning back at me out of the mirror like a tiny white harbinger of doom. “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return,” was what it would have said if only it could speak. And that’s it. Game over. One single, solitary white hair, and suddenly, you realise you are mortal.

OK, I suppose it could be worse. After all, the remaining 100,000 are still their usual dusty brown, with the occasional tinge of yellow (I was blond as a child – been trying to work out what went wrong ever since). But still, the sudden realisation that one is not actually immune to the passage of time is to say the least unnerving. And in case I’m giving the wrong impression, let me make it clear that this has nothing to with the fear of death. To die, and to go we not know where, is chickenfeed compared to the social and professional repercussions of staying alive, but failing to remain eternally young. For make no mistake, we live in cruel, unsavoury times. There is forgiveness for everything in this world: war, torture, murder, corruption, voting Labour, you name it. But there can be no forgiveness, not now, not ever, for the ultimate sin of growing old.

Ask Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom – that small island nation in the North Atlantic which invented football, celebrities and binge drinking. Everything was going splendidly for Ming, until someone happened to comment that he looked “tired” during the party’s AGM some weeks ago. And don’t you think he’s a little too… wrinkly?
Wrinkly? Tired? And still leader of a political party? This will not do. After all, we are now living in the shadow of Paris Hilton and under the listless gaze of Celebrity Big Brother. There is quite simply no more place for people over 60 in the leadership of any forward-looking political party. And Ming the Merciless was 68.
So the Lib Dems lost two leaders in quick succession – one to age, and the other to booze – and this in a country which has always had a long and illustrious tradition of choosing gloriously alcoholic old fogies as leaders, often with spectacular results.
Just look at Sir Winston Churchill (you may have heard the name, there’s a brand of cigarettes named after him). He was 67 when he was appointed to head the War Cabinet, and 71 when he actually won the war. He was younger than Sir Menzies, and an infinitely bigger boozer than Charles Kennedy, though neither age nor partiality to tipple seemed to bother anyone at the time.
That was in the good old days, when men were men, and women worked in the factories to make sure they had enough bullets on the Western front. Today, a 67-year-old drunk would be laughed off the podium for even suggesting that he might make a half-decent Prime Minister. And can you imagine the UK press response to the “We will fight on the beaches” speech, had it been delivered in 2007 instead of 1940? I can see the cartoons already: Churchill whacking Hitler on the head with his walking stick, hipflask visible in pocket, while his dentures fall out of his mouth.
Fortunately for us, however, Churchill and Hitler – who by the way was a teetotaller, and not yet 50 when he died – existed in an era when age still commanded a tiny bit of respect. Otherwise, I shudder to think where we would all be today.

Back to the future, and the cult of ageism seems to be seeping in at all levels. Still in Britain, David Cameron beat David Davis to the leadership of the Conservative Party, not because he had the better policies, but simply because he looked younger. Ridiculously younger, I might add. In fact, if he looked any younger he’d need his parents’ permission to watch “Harry Potter and the Half-baked Ponce” (or whatever that film was called).
And do you know what the worst part of it is? The only reason looks have suddenly become an issue for the Tories (a party with a great tradition of beautiful leaders, by the way: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Michael Howard, etc.) is because the party strategists were responding to a cosmetic make-over that had already won Labour’s sprightly young Mr Blair three consecutive terms in office. By inference, future party leaders can only keep getting younger and younger. Personally, I’m waiting for the day when the Prime Minister of Britain is driven to work by his or her baby-sitter.

Over to Malta, the centre of the known Universe, and it seems that the school of political philosophy spawned on the catwalks of Paris, New York and Milan has been welcomed with open arms. Any excuse to lash out at the detested leader of the Opposition seems to be a good enough excuse: so the fact that he is the grand total of six years older than the Prime Minister now appears to be the driving force behind the entire Nationalist electoral campaign.
Sad as this undeniably is, it is a strategy that nonetheless offers enormous potential for comedy. For instance: in his zeal to lash out at Alfred Sant, Education Minister Louis Galea recently chose to drag himself through the mire, too: “Sant and myself will both be applying for our ‘kartanzjani’ soon,” he quipped... the implication being that unlike the “flower of youth” that is Lawrence Gonzi, both Alfred Sant and Louis Galea will soon be 60, and are therefore passé, over the hill, yesterday’s men.
Well, what can I say? Nice to know our Education Minister considers himself to be completely useless. I could have told him so myself – in fact I did so on numerous occasions – but then again, I have a white hair in my beard now, so I suppose I’m over the hill as well.

The irony, of course, is that this strategy comes from a party that is about as modern and forward looking as Mary Fenech Adami in a faldetta. Just look at the recent PN general conference, with its 17th century style speeches (“Glory be to Gonzi!”) delivered to an audience of fossilized kunsilliera whose combined ages would require a 2-billion gigabyte computer to even calculate.
Ah, but the moment Robert Musumeci and Jean Pierre Farrugia – both of whom are well under 50 – did the youthful thing and displayed a little rebellious bravado for a change, they were promptly told to shut up, and even had their microphones cut off in mid-sentence. So much, I suppose, for the PN’s newfound fondness for youth.

And this brings one to the really worrying part. Youth, it seems, is not admired because it is more daring, more open-minded, more energetic or more dynamic. Youth is preferred simply because it looks better for the cameras.
My own experience of the younger generation strongly suggests that people under 30 today are infinitely more conservative than their own parents. University students? You’d think they didn’t exist at all, if it wasn’t for the occasional protest when they are denied parking places for their cars, or when the government threatens to take away their stipends.
Back in the political arena, and again it is always the younger MPs who express the most alarmingly archaic and judgmental attitudes, constantly harping on morality and family values for all the world as if they invented the concepts themselves.
I have a theory to account for this. My guess is that older, conservative politicians have learnt through personal experience that it is always wise to keep quiet about family issues, because sooner or later their own children are quite likely to embarrass them enormously… by leaving their spouses, for instance, or by having kids out of wedlock, or by turning out to be gay. On the other hand, all those younger daddies and mummies whose kids are still playing with their Playmobil may take a little longer to realise this simple fact. This might explain why the most viscerally conservative MPs tend overwhelmingly to be in the 30-45 age bracket.

The bottom line, however, is that I just don’t see why we should trust to youth any more than to old age when it comes to political responsibility. Of the present government, it is the younger ministers – I won’t mention names, but you all know who I’m talking about – who have proved to be the most corrupt. And I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that the present Prime Minister, on whose “youth” the PN strategists set so much store, not only retained these frisky black lambkins of the Cabinet family, but also defended them tooth and nail in parliament.
Is this surprising? Not really. Corruption has always been valued at a higher premium than honesty in this country. People make no secret of the fact that they admire successful criminals, although they sometimes try and hide their automatic contempt for the law-abiding citizens among us.
What really surprises me is that we are now expected to prefer this same unwholesome bunch to their equally unattractive rivals – not because they have anything particularly better to offer, but simply because their party leader is only 53 years young.

Sorry, folks, but if this is the way the campaign is going to go, give me “age” before “beauty” any day.