Close season

The latest season of the MLP leadership issue, then, was closed on Friday, in good time for the pomp of the opening of the Tenth Legislature on the morrow. That closure coincided with the end of the open season for trapping and hunting. The beginning of that particular close season - birds will be painfully aware - is no ironclad guarantee that trapping and shooting will halt. The Nationalists will not suspend hostilities. The PN general secretary's early confirmation of that prediction was simply the crudest.

They demonstrate no hint of awareness that the next general election could be as much as 62 months away. They strain to trap and fire at their Labour opponents from the crack of dawn and on through the night as well. They show more interest in what goes on in the Labour Party than within their own ranks - with various good reasons, including that from this point on they may be heading nowhere but downhill.

Both commentators with a political bias and others who try to analyse the scene without departing from ingrained prejudice and predilection are also unlikely to stop looking closely at and opining upon the political class. In that regard the Nationalist media are displaying considerable myopia over the contests for the two MLP deputy leader posts. The (double) outcome certainly did not go by the way of the previous week's silvery full moon. The mood seemed to have had time to swing much more extensively still. The key feature, nevertheless, was not the humiliation of that one or the other.

It lies in the manner whereby the delegates, through unexpected ringing majorities to the successful contestants on Thursday and Friday, handed the party and its refurbished leadership a real chance of a fresh start. The reinstated leader will already have split the electoral term ahead into strategically defined phases. He may be expected to begin the first one by cashing in carefully the fistful of chips the delegates gave him to start off his third go at the job. The first perception to project will be that the deputy leaders have ample space to work in.

They will be the highly visible new face of the party and thereby the combined leadership will have a new look. The change is likely to include marked alterations within the leader himself, by himself. These will be discernible enough to those who keep their eyes on the ball rather than following body feints. It will not be a Kafkaesque metamorphosis.

Alfred Sant's will gradually replace his image according to a new script and characterisation for the party and for himself he will probably have already drafted. He drew the outline plan for the props in his turn at a pre-leadership contest address on the party's TV channel.

They included closed-doors assemblies of delegates to give them space to air bottom-up views away from the eyes of the preying media, aside from any leaks; a daily newspaper in English, to reach out to a segment of floaters-disaffected-undecided voters; and a satirical paper to try to erode opponents by taking the Mickey out of them.

Props aside, the real strategy will hardly be worked out on stage. Political scripts do not rest on soliloquies to the television cameras. The course of the actual play will be seen as the real script unfolds. Labour's new quest for the Holy Grail, however, begins with a fair wind. That is what the delegates have provided in the way they elected Charles Mangion and Michael Falzon as deputy leaders.

What actually takes place on the high seas to be crossed will depend not just on the new deputy leaders and the old leader, but also on the officers and the rest of the crew, under the scrutiny of the delegates as representatives of the grassroots. It will also depend considerably on style, in addition to substance. It should not be difficult to raise the style from the pre- and even early post- general election depths it had sunk to. A change in substance has been dictated by the grim circumstance of failure and by a new beginning pegged on insistence that basic principles have to be steadfastly safeguarded.

Sharp observation of the leadership's direction and methods and the impact along the stages of the five-year voyage is unlikely to go out of season.