Cleaning out for rats and arsenic

Old habits die hard, particularly bad ones. Its leadership in place the MLP will wish to move forward. The process will not take off smoothly unless such rats as still lurk here and there are flushed out and exterminated. Those rats took it upon themselves to muddy the leadership contest in an ugly manner to an extent not fully revealed. Poison was poured out, mixing old techniques with use of modern technology.

In the old days poison was delivered wrapped in dirty letters. This is the age of the internet. Although the Labour Party machine failed miserably to remember that in the last general election campaign, those within it who find it impossible to play a clean game did not. They used their trusted poison letter, certainly. They did so with clinical precision, sending it directly to a few people. Old hands at the game, they worked out how to flash deadly signals, counting on an assumption that some targeted victims would prefer not to publicise and call for investigations on the attacks upon them, out of consideration for their loved ones.

The signals were then spread by whispered word of filthy mouth. That paralleled another, more widespread, campaign made in that manner. It came forth from the bowels of the party machine, where individuals protecting their vested interest took it upon themselves to promote their favoured candidate in the most unethical of manners, which tainted his campaign rather than helped it. He did not need, and surely did not authorise, such tactics. It remains to be seen how Joseph Muscat will ferret out and deal with the guilty few, to make it crystal clear that this is truly the start of a new season.

Those who campaigned more anonymously with arsenic put their grasp of the e-mail factor to full use. Nobody seems to want to say it, but in this regard they were helped by elements within the PN media. That party's TV station gave itself away when it published the still from a film of a PN meeting on the EU which pictured George Abela's daughter. Other stations, as well as newspapers, received the planted clip, but did not publish it, so as not to play the game of the perpetrators. Net TV carried it - along with the film itself from which the clip was taken. In the trade-off game, someone from within the PN media had passed it to those within the MLP who did not simply oppose Dr Abela's candidature, but were prepared to block it by the foulest of manners. The MLP will now be concentrating, as it should, on targeting the Nationalist Party.

That has its own situations, the most current of which is Simon Busuttil's amazing need to reveal that Dr and Mrs Lawrence Gonzi had urged him to put his name forward to become the PN's next general secretary. The to-dos to fill the gap left by Joe Saliba will offer welcome grist to the Labour mill, after weeks and weeks during which the PN media concentrated on the carryings-on in the MLP.

It is Labour's turn in the media circus. That is not to say that Labour should not clean up its own act. If a strenuous effort is not made to identify the elements that targeted a number of the contestants through dirty means, the MLP will continue to shelter rats in its cupboards.