There's something about Lawrence

Lawrence Gonzi entered his party's leadership campaign with a question mark over whether he had the nerve required for leadership. Yes, the doubters said, he has that voice and smile that come across so well in the media. But does he have (to use the favoured, chauvinist image) the testosteronic epicentre needed to be a political mover and shaker?

Looking at the scorecard I kept on each candidate during the campaign, I find that Dr Gonzi scored an A for nerve. Somewhat to my surprise, his score for dealings with the media was a B.

Throughout the campaign, I followed what each candidate's camp believed its hero's chances to be. From the outset, the Gonzi camp believed in victory, with a conservative estimate of at least 50 per cent of the vote in the first round.

At the beginning of the last week, before the results of the Xarabank survey were known, someone in the Gonzi camp offered me a prediction: 55 per cent for Lawrence Gonzi, 25-30 per cent for John Dalli, 10-15 per cent for Louis Galea.

Naturally I did not believe it and not just because those percentages do not add up to 100. In the thick of a campaign, it is easy to lose one's sense of perspective. Manic-depression is common, as each rumour and single-sourced item of news ricochets in the closed echo chamber that campaign teams tend to be.

And there was plenty to make one's mood swing over those three weeks. The confidence of the Dalli camp is public news. In the Galea camp, by the end of the second week someone believed that at the end of the first round Dr Gonzi might rake in 40 per cent of the vote, with the rest being split almost equally between Mr Dalli and Dr Galea.

The second week ended with a widespread impression that Mr Dalli had made significant inroads and was within breathing distance of Dr Gonzi. The expectation itself was hardening some councillors in both camps, who, the competition getting to them, were on the point of turning into enemies of their champion's competitor.

In these conditions, it takes a cool nerve, if not cold blood, to remain focused on what your calculations tell you and not give in to visceral feelings. Yet, with the election still coming to a climax, Dr Gonzi began to speak of the week after the vote, when the party, fractured by an intense campaign that was probably a week too long, would need to unite around a new leader.

His dealings with the media, however, were less sure-footed. True, he constructed a form of communication that suited the image he wanted to project. Mr Dalli, the presidential decision-taker, spoke from a podium with epic images behind him. Dr Galea, the grassroots team-builder, had a deliberately more homely approach. Dr Gonzi, the man of dialogue, was interviewed by Pierre Portelli - no doubt triggering fresh memories among the listeners of the same journalist interviewing Eddie Fenech Adami during the referendum and election campaigns.

But there were moments of surprising nervousness. He told one journalist he had no intention of giving him satisfaction. He suggested to another that those people who said he was not decisive might have undeclared reasons for saying so. In his key TV interview, he cracked a hollow populist joke about Alfred Sant.

These unforced errors might simply be a sign of relative inexperience with the media. But I believe they could be linked to two other areas of relative inexperience that have been under-noticed.

Dr Gonzi has shown that he has a cool nerve when he deals with people he knows well - whether it is the GWU, or the social partners, or the restricted electorate of the PN councillors. He knows when to charm and when to put on the pressure. But he has yet to be really tested with a larger electorate made up of people he does not know.

It might be only a coincidence but his media errors came when he was trying to address an unknown audience over, so to speak, the interviewer's shoulder. When he focused on the interviewer, he spoke well. I have seen something similar, over the past three years, when observing him give speeches - rousing speeches to the party faithful; a failure to find quite the right pitch with an audience he does not know.

If it is true that he has yet to develop a feeling for the larger, personally unknown electorate, then the imminent retirement of Dr Fenech Adami has added political significance.

Together with Richard Cachia Caruana, Dr Fenech Adami is said to have been a vital, almost indispensable asset in the PN's ability to read opinion polls, often in unexpected ways. The withdrawal of these two from the PN scene might well leave Dr Gonzi vulnerable in the area where he has most to learn.