Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the greatest of them all? That is what Lorna Vassallo keeps asking in her vain hope of the answer being "Dr Alfred Sant".
Rather than tell us why we should repeat our 1996-98 experience and vote Dr Sant again in government, the Labour candidate (and candidate for the post of MLP general secretary and ex-CNI official) tries to compare Dr Sant with the premier league of Maltese politics: Gorg Borg Olivier, Dom Mintoff and Eddie Fenech Adami. What comes out of her table (April 13), apart from the glaringly obvious historical mistakes? The only conclusion worth gleaning from Dr Vassallo's labour is that Dr Sant's leadership status is minor league, even worse than Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici's.
Compared with the three prime ministers Dr Vassallo selected, and according to her own table, Dr Sant is the only one who was Leader of the Opposition for a longer time than he was Prime Minister. According to her own investigation, Dr Sant has been Prime Minister for a period of time which is less than a seventh of any of the other three.
And in just a year's time, according to Dr Vassallo's great exploratory toil, Dr Sant will break the negative record as the Maltese politician who held the post of Leader of the Opposition for the longest time! Only the Guinness Book of Records will appreciate her boomerang-aggrandisement of Dr Sant.
But, of course, Dr Vassallo can always fantasise about Dr Sant's future rather than his past. And, according to her tea leaves, we could still have to endure Dr Sant for a further four general elections.
Four general elections? What a good time to be had!
If I were a Labour supporter (which I was in the past), rather than engage in this fanciful crystal ball gazing, I would bemoan the fact that Labour under Dr Sant has managed to establish itself as the natural party of opposition when this year it would have possibly been striving for a third consecutive general election victory after 10 years in government (having won in 1996 and what would have been a 2001 general election).
Rather than labouring under the illusion that Dr Sant is up there with the great and the good, a genuine Labourite would face reality and conclude that Dr Sant has been even worse for Labour than Dr Mifsud Bonnici.
Dr Sant has lost two general elections and a national referendum and is still sitting pretty for Dr Vassallo to fantasise about his supposedly great future. But Dr Mifsud Bonnici, who was Prime Minister for longer than Dr Sant, had the essential decency to resign after his second defeat.
Dr Mifsud Bonnici lost two (not one, according to Dr Vassallo's research) general elections that were virtually impossible to win. Dr Sant managed to convince the Labour executive and general conference that Labour should go for an early election in 1998, that Labour would increase its majority in 1998 challenging Mr Mintoff head-on, that referendum abstentions and invalid votes should be counted for the "partnership" option, and that the 2003 general election should be based on Dr Sant's erroneous reading of the referendum result. These are fundamental mistakes Dr Sant lead Labour into and confirm him, as Dr Vassallo's research also does, in the minor-league of Maltese politics.
In the folie de grandeur of 1998, Dr Sant tried to beat at once two of the greats, Mr Mintoff and Dr Fenech Adami, but failed disastrously in his quest yet succeeded providentially, against his wishes, to get Malta back on the EU track and this just another Labour defeat away from membership. He duly obliged again in March 2003 with his "celebrations" of the referendum "partnership victory" in Marsa.
If Dr Sant does manage to become Prime Minister again, his recent past shows that Labour has further "pleasures" yet to endure in bad leadership and worse decisions.
True, Dr Sant is a titan of Maltese literature having written the longest novel in Maltese (Silg fuq Kemmuna) and is a prolific writer of the left, but that does not make him a great political leader.
Rather than comparing Dr Sant with other Maltese prime ministers, a leader who springs to mind as a model for Dr Sant is Michael Foot, another prolific writer and literary man, but who dreadfully led British Labour to its worst defeat in modern British political history having fought a general election on a manifesto that was famously described as "the longest suicide note in history".
But, of course, comparisons are odious!