Roamer's column

Dear Prime Minister,
You must have had it up to your neck, or as my late English brother-in-law once expressed himself in Italian on a bad day, "Io l'ho avuto su mio collo." There is probably not another word you can take about the past fortnight; so here are 1,550, anyway.

The EP elections nightmare is over, but it happened; time now to forge ahead, but you cannot move forward unless you glance backwards to see what went bump on June 6. It was certainly not Joseph Muscat even if he has something to smile about he did not have eight months ago, when he was fresh and green and in some ways, still is.

Dangerous to dismiss him for all that; not least because tens of thousands of voters do not regard him that way. Of these, the overwhelming majority are his core supporters who now feel they have a fighting chance in 2012/2013. Psychologically, that is a strong position for a political party to be in.

You and his opponents may see him as mutton dressed as lamb and it was not his cuddliness that undid you on D-Day. He did not flinch from waving the health card and an invisible health card at that. This impressed those who voted for Labour's MEPs, but it may be of some consolation that it will not form part of his weaponry at the next general election; not least because your man in health will do nothing to alarm the electorate on this score.

Nor was Muscat lamb-like about those fiendish water and electricity bills - the impression that these would be brought down when and if Labour were returned to power was a false one. His general secretary declared publicly and recently that they would be, only to be corrected, as publicly, by Labour MEP Louis Grech. After June 6, his boss came to the conclusion reached by your government that the price of oil would be the determining factor in the amount we pay for this commodity. The perversion of the truth turned into a conversion from the party lie.

On the subject of immigration, hunters and VAT registration on cars Muscat outdid even Alfred Sant in the brazenness of his approach. Yet that VAT business, his vested interest in it and the promise to pay back €50 million of taxpayers' money if the court case against the government did not rule in his favour, raised ne-er an eyebrow from his supporters, nor from those in AD's neck of the wood, nor for that matter, from many in yours.

AD, it is now clear, has had its neck wrung. Its attempt to become a political party was a forlorn one to begin with: its task was to be an environmental pressure group, at which it would have been excellent; now this role is being snatched from under its feet. Where is the masochist to take up the poisoned chalice?

Be that as it may, there are reasons why the Labour Party, with its historic hostility to Malta's membership of the EU, did you in a fortnight ago: one was the Nationalist Party's campaign. This was not virile enough to turn around those of your party supporters who, like you after the election results came in, had had it up to here before they voted. One light shone above the fray, Simon Busuttil's extraordinary capture of 68,000 No 1 votes, but even his excess did not transfer helpfully to elect the third MEP.

Another reason was your failure to understand the genuine hurt of a number of voters, whether this originated from the water and electricity bills, from some form of injustice, real and perceived, or from being recipients of cavalier treatment - the in-word at the moment is arrogance - by those whose business it is to be more attentive, to explain better those measures that were deemed necessary.

You now need to lure back outright deserters who upped their fingers at you, rightly or wrongly; 'twere best you assumed they were adverbially the former else you run the risk of complacency in the way you intend to deal with what has been a humbling experience. These will rejoin the flag once they detect a genuine, as opposed to a mouthing, concern for their problems.

There are those who are going around saying that there are still four years to go before the next general election. You know better than I do that four years is a short time in politics; more than that, the idea that all will be well on the night is alarmingly complacent, one I am certain you do not entertain.

So; what to do?

One thing is clear; your command and control of the macro-scale is impeccable. It is in the micro-swarm that you sometimes, or, your critics say, often fail.

It is clear you must not abandon your programme of reforms. You were elected to carry it out. What you can do, however, is implement the rest of it with more political nous on the part of your government by remembering you have a constituency whose backing you need and whose genuine, as opposed to selfish, anxieties should be kept in mind. This is not a matter of clientelism, but of weeding out injustices.

First thing that you have to do about the micro bit is to insist with your ministers and backbenchers, including the bolshie ones, to hold weekly surgeries in their constituency, make themselves available to their political 'patients', diagnose what these have to say, deal sympathetically, not impatiently, with hypochondriacs, note the stress of those who have a genuine condition and report back to you, either singly, or in some collegial manner. Only in this way can you keep your promise to be sensitive to the feelings out there.

At the same time, communications between MPs and local councillors should be kept permanently open. It is these who see and experience at firsthand the political atmosphere in which they breathe. Second thing; not everything said about Mepa is correct; there are occasions when what is flung about has the property of dung, but there is no doubt that the Planning Authority has yet to get its act together.

You promised as a matter of priority to put this right by taking that prickly beast uncomfortably under your wings. I know you had no inkling that the recession was a few months away when you made that commitment and this required much of your attention and time, but take it from a friend - the Mepa reform has to be brought to term by the end of August and certainly by the time Parliament meets after the summer recess.

Take advantage of the latter and, with Kate, charming Kate, go to some restful mountain retreat or on an idyllic holiday in one of so many restful Tuscan spots, there to refresh yourselves from the hurly-burly that has been the past year.

Third thing; don't let Muscat get into your hair - as time goes on he will be getting into that section of the electorate's hair where it matters. Nobody who bothered to read his interview in this newspaper last Sunday will have missed the egregious point he dismally failed to make, that you have done nothing about anything (and this when Malta outdid every member country and received dix pointes, more than any other EU country, for job creation during the first three months of the year); when the investment he does not see coming into the island is coming into the island; nor his ludicrous explanation of what Jason Micallef said about electricity rates - "I don't think he meant to say (what he said)" - No?

Nor his eel-like wriggling over the immigration issue where, only last Friday, the European Council welcomed the Commission's intention to take initiatives in this area, "starting with a pilot project for Malta"; nor his intemperate recommendation that Malta should wield the power of the veto in European councils to get its way on matters like immigration; nor his disgraceful behaviour when he kept you waiting half-an-hour at Guardamangia for the final debate before the EP elections.

On June 2 he confessed to The Times that he was not a stickler for protocol when this was not so much a matter of protocol as a total absence of elementary good manners.

One of his aides was reported as having told the newspaper that there was "no particular reason for the delay" (arrogance at the top leads to arrogance down the line), but in that interview Muscat said, "There was a misunderstanding" and followed this up with the staggering remark that he "can't understand why there's all this fuss"; which says something about the man.

Listen, trumpet your achievements by not preaching only to the converted. A number of lapsed supporters do not read your party's newspaper so here is a suggestion: once a month, or bi-monthly, the party should publish, in the form of an advertisement in all the newspapers, those parts of the election manifesto that have been carried out and those that are coming on stream.

And worry about the small things that affect Everyman. As for your MPs, call on them to imitate Busuttil.