Roamer's column

It has been a long gestation period with threatened miscarriages along the way. On Thursday we will know the name of the child, the colour of its eyes, the texture of its skin, its gender, shape and, the umbilical cord having been cut - we hope - what this new issue will tell us about the Labour Party.

The problem with Labour has to do, for the most part, with those who have led it since 1949 and the party machinery they willed into being - and controlled. Then, a young, irascible Dom Mintoff split with Paul Boffa and later ascended to the leadership where he stayed for more than 30 years, 19 of them in power.

He transformed the party into his image, by no means an alluring one. It is now being admitted even by members of his Cabinet in the 1980s (how myopic they were, then) that his dismal, divisive method of government created a political environment that returned the Nationalist Party to power for what will be a quarter of a century come 2013 - bar a 22-month interruption. During that brief interlude, a man Mr Mintoff loathed, and who was to loathe him back, ascended the stairs of Castille in 1996, only to be shown the door of that Auberge in 1998 courtesy of the great man himself.

It should never have been that way, of course; Alfred Sant was young and bright. He projected an image of New Labour, offered a new style government; Old Labour was a nightmare of the past. It worked. In 1996, he ousted Eddie Fenech Adami from office. Labour saw itself in power for the next 10 years, at least. As with all good things, bad ones crop up to spoil them.

Dr Sant, it turned out, could not distinguish between significant points of policy and mere administrative details. He was mired in the VAT-CET swamp for the first nine months and then, scarcely recovered, drowned in the Cottonera Waterfront, a thingy that he elevated to the wholly undeserved status of a parliamentary vote of confidence; which he lost. As he came up for the third time, he could hear the voice of a backbencher accusing him of giving up on the party's social conscience. That man was Mr Mintoff.

It was to be the end of Dr Sant, but it was a slow end. It took 10 years for the curtain to fall on what some see as his tragedy of errors. These included three election defeats, a lost referendum, a resignation in 2003, the injudicious withdrawal of same and the creation of a party machinery that developed political pneumonia in both its left lung and its right yet still kept a rigor mortis grip on proceedings. The pre-eminence of party over individual remains stamped on the minds of four of the leadership contestants.

Mr Mintoff's legacy was calamitous; only diehards would dissent from this opinion. Ironically, the man who maimed Mr Mintoff permanently by calling Labour's erstwhile 'saviour' a 'traitor' and who could have steered the party away from the arid political desert into which it had been led, was himself destroyed by Mr Mintoff. Dr Sant's legacy was equally disastrous. Witness the pickle the party is in.

Pickled Labour

Politicians ambitious to get to the top of the heap carry some pretty heavy baggage. This is to be expected, I suppose; what is not, is the unseemliness we have been witnessing as the contestants bare their credentials, or, in Joseph Muscat's case, have these bared on his behalf by the head, no less, of the Party of European Socialists (PES) in the European Parliament.

Martin Schulz's intervention failed to amuse Dr Muscat's four brothers-in-the-leadership. They complained to the PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and asked him to disassociate the group from Schulz, and schnell, bitte. Dr Muscat cancelled other endorsements by MEPs he had lined up. On a Net TV programme he denied that he had any further endorsements planned. In the meantime, Mr Rasmussen wrote to say that Mr Schulz had merely defended Dr Muscat from Malta's right-wing press. Over and out.

But all this was nothing compared with the earthquake provided by the Commission set up to report on Labour's third election loss in 10 years. Most of us were aware that Labour's election campaign was a no-no; few knew just how structurally incompetent it was.

The nonsense of the reception class and the surcharge, Charles Mangion's DNA gaffe, Sant's "Goooonzi", the bilge of the billboards; these were gleefully pounced upon by the PN and failed to impress even Labour supporters. Less generally known was the divorce between a fatally self-indulgent Labour leadership gazing narcissistically upon its electoral naval, and the reality out there.

At the back of it all was a party machinery that literally did not know whether it was coming or going; as events turned out, it was going. Impossible though this may sound, warnings in the party's surveys on the youth-Labour relationship and waning support on education and health issues were ignored; or at best, regarded with complacency.

Not only; proposals made by the Commission reporting after the 2003 election were never implemented. There was mental dysfunction even over the straightforward fact that there were over 30,000 new voters; and there was that little matter of an extra 60 minutes tagged on to the hours of voting.

A careful browse through the document also highlights digs at - did you say Michael Falzon? Well, the man tore into the report. He revealed that he had warned the Commission that he would go public unless changes were made to its flawed analysis, and did. "...blatant lies..." were only a part of the vocabulary he employed at a packed press conference.

In short, Labour's election campaign was fought, it appears, using mirrors that were not there. This sleight of vision was reflected in the final outcome.

Will it be unpickled?

It is all very well for Dr Muscat to say, as he did in an interview that appeared in this newspaper last Sunday, that the first thing he would do if elected leader would be "to ask the other four colleagues to give me all their energy and time to play a central role within the party." Alas, 'twixt cup and lip...George Abela? Michael Falzon? Evarist Bartolo? Hardly. Ms Coleiro Preca? Perhaps.

In her case, there came endorsements from Vincent Moran, who still thinks it is time "for us veterans to guide the younger generation in their choice"; from Daniel Micallef, who batted on her behalf at a breakfast meeting she hosted and referred, somewhat lugubriously, to "the roots of experience that feed the Socialist soul"; and from Joe Debono Grech whose happy self-incarceration in the Mintoff time-warp is matched in its wretched gleefulness only by his belief that the Labour youth brigade should be resuscitated - a belief shared, unfortunately, by Ms Coleiro Preca.

The question of unpickling Labour is fraught. No doubt an effort to close ranks will be made once a winner is declared, but the bitter taste left in the mouths of the losers will linger on for a long while yet. Accusations that the contest had been 'poisoned' (ivvalenata) were not picked out of the air. They were made by those who suffered from the poisoning. Any hope that those affected will line up behind Dr Muscat, should he win, may be a forlorn one. If back-stabbing is what Dr Muscat wants to learn about, he can do worse than have a long chat with Dr Falzon.

The thing about a Muscat victory is that all things being equal, he will be there for the next 30-35 years, a political eternity. Even if he were not a direct descendant of Dr Sant, that is way too long. Think of the agony to be endured by those forced to stand and wait until 2045.

I made my choice many weeks ago - George Abela, but a fat lot of use this is to him. I am not even a paid up member of the MLP, let alone one of its delegates. But hell! For three years even Jason Micallef was not a paid-up member.

Meanwhile...

Tempting to think that the long gestation period was deliberately planned to keep the Nationalist Party out of the news. If so, it worked, but judging from the multiple miscarriages in the Labour ward it is pertinent to ask at what price?

Be the answer to that whate'er it is, the media has not reacted much to the Nationalists' capture of the Mtarfa local council, a confirmation that Labour continues to be out of favour. Nor has it made much of the party's general council this weekend, or of the party's selection of a general secretary once Joe Saliba bows out.

The choices are important in the context of the party's need for regeneration in the light of challenges posed by the government's vision of 2015. Dr Gonzi needs a man around him who is young, mentally and physically energetic, dominating (not domineering) and collegial, of calm and steady mind and deeply conscious of a need for reform - not least in the party's media, where most good things ought to reside.