Iceberg? What iceberg?

The term Nationalist Party (also read government) strategist has for some years now been an oxymoron. Just as the party in government emerges from one damaging episode, it dives, head first, straight into another. No one is on the mast to spot and safely navigate icebergs; if there is someone, he is either not trusted or his appointment for an eye test is way overdue.

The longer this problem goes without surgery, and what is required is major intervention, the sooner the party in government will slide to the end of a slippery slope with only one obvious exit – and that is out of the front doors of Castille.

Those who want to see it, can see it; those who do not wish to, will continue to ply their sycophantic but ultimately self-defeating trade in the corridors that currently wield a rather strange kind of power. Until, of course, that will no longer prove possible.

The honoraria debacle, and the inconsistent explanations that accompanied it, will live long enough in people’s memory to cause the party in government harm come the election.

And even those prepared to overlook such lack of judgment because they believe the PN does the fundamentals much better than Labour – such as managing the economy in very difficult worldwidecircumstances and its ability to handle, for example, an outpouring of foreign nationals from Libya – will be feeling jittery after the Arriva experience.

The company that took over the public transport system may be a private entity. But it is this government that selected it; this government that should have ensured the routes were workable; and this government that inexplicably chose to go for the changeover as the peak tourism season was upon us.

For all the barking we have seen from the Transport Minister, there has beenno acceptance of responsibility when that responsibility lies at the door of hisministry. This is a reflection of fatigue and detachment.

But it is on the old divorce chestnut that the party really continues to flounder, when it has had one opportunity after another to get its act together.

However honestly held the Prime Minister’s personal stand on divorce is, his decision first to needlessly create an issue for weeks over how he was going to vote – since he did not say so immediately – and second to vote No in Parliament last week, is likely to have political repercussions.

This for one simple reason: had Lawrence Gonzi left the decision solely to Parliament after his hand was, to an extent, forced by one of his own MPs, he could have voted as he wished. But once he himself conceived a referendum, in spite of criticism from heavyweight Nationalists who said moral or minority issues should not be determined in such a manner, he took a calculated gamble – based not on principle, but on politics.

Since the referendum, there has been no respite. Talk of principle and conscience stutters because the issue was, for political purposes, handed over to the public to decide, and rifts within the party have become more evident.

Last Friday the PN lost a candidate whom it was, post referendum defeat, promoting – though it must be said that Cyrus Engerer’s decision to cross the political divide was neither an advisable nor noble way forward. Nobody trusts turncoats, not even those who receive them.

The Nationalist Party cannot propel itself away from values that have been anintegral part of it for years – some of its members’ sudden talk of ‘liberal’sounds rather panicky and hollow – andnor would it be wise to do so.

What it does need to do, however, is use the summer period to reflect on righting its wrongs and once again become an all-embracing party before an election campaign is upon it.

The question is, will it? Without a shake-up in personnel, it does not seem likely.