Editorial

If there is one word that best describes the Labour Party, both in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the election, it is confusion. It did not seem to know where it was going during the campaign, and has been a rudderless vessel ever since.

Icebergs there have been aplenty and no attempt is being made to avoid them. On the contrary, it seems that some of its major players - first among which is the general secretary - head straight for them. In the space of a few days Jason Micallef publicly alienated George Abela, and then indirectly blamed Michael Falzon for its electoral defeat. Various senior members have since come out to point accusing fingers straight back at him.

At precisely the point when the Labour Party should be seeking to start righting the wrongs that have cost it the past three general elections, it is increasingly coming across to those looking in as a party in crisis. Mr Micallef, who should be the calming influence in the wake of the departure of the MLP leader, is more than partly responsible for this.

Things are going from bad to worse. When George Abela walked into the offices of The Sunday Times last Thursday with a gagging order from the MLP's board of vigilance - he had supposedly come for an interview - the first reaction of the newspaper was to check if he had been duped. The letter was appropriately dated April 1, and it defied any semblance of logic that anybody could have been foolish enough to devise such a thing.

But they were and they did. The dictat stated that nobody who intended to contest the leadership should speak to the media, which meant there could be no interview - even though this newspaper (and other media) had carried out a similar exercise with the other known contenders.

We can only speculate over whether this was a deliberate act by the party machinery to silence Dr Abela - and maybe Marie Louise Colerio since she was due to launch her campaign the following day - or just a quirky act by a quirky body, since it is difficult to see what the other contenders stood to gain if neither they had the opportunity to speak.

Whatever the case, all of them should have defied it for at least two reasons: first, because the mark of a leader is to stand up for what is right irrespective of his or her electoral prospects, not acquiesce to a rotten state of affairs; and second, because it was fairly obvious that the board would have to make a U-turn even as quickly as that same evening.

Within all this mist, there is one point of clarity that emerges: the enormity of the task ahead for the one who takes the tottering crown on June 5. He or she must be able to perform the delicate balancing act of forcing through radical change while bringing much-needed unity.

Yet this will only be possible if the contest is fair, and perceived to be so both by those within the party as well as by those outside whom it must attract to have any prospect of success. We all know what happened in the wake of the bitterness of the MLP's last leadership election, and history has a nasty habit of repeating itself.