There's a saying about having enough dosh allows you to build roads on the sea. It doesn't mention pies in the sky, but perhaps it should.

Joseph Muscat has made water and electricity rates his warhorse. It is the central theme of the campaign, because if his plans don't work, he's promised to go - if they don't work in that he doesn't get to skip daintily up the steps to Castille, I suspect he won't have a choice, if they don't work after he's installed behind the Big Desk, it will be too late for us, so he might as well stay.

Be that as it may be, and however boring you may find them, those rates are the battleground, because Muscat has decreed it to be so. The irony is, after nailing his colours to that particular mast, Muscat has managed to pull off some pretty spectacular prestidigitation.

Simultaneously, he's diverted the discussion into the technical feasibility of his cunning plan, at the same time slamming the barn-door against any discussion on the real feasibility of it.

There is no question that if you chuck enough money at a problem you can probably solve it but discussions about gas pipelines or gas tanks the size of Mosta Dome or shiny new power-stations that can light up the country like a Xmas Tree are completely irrelevant.

In the real world, these discussions take second place to realities that are a sight more relevant than the technical doability of Muscat's little scheme to get people to vote for him.

Konrad Mizzi's daddy, Edward Scicluna's co-director, Sandro Chetcuti's buddies and the General Workers' Union Danish Village person don't appear to be concerned by these realities.

The rest of us need to be, because when the bill comes in, the buck will stop with us, whatever silly promises Muscat makes about leaving. The realities which Muscat's boys (and girl) simply will not discuss are centred on a very stark set of numbers.

We're being asked to believe (because Muscat is very, very confident, you see) that a commercial entity, driven solely and exclusively by its bottom line, is going to build us a shiny new gas-fired power-station (which we do not need, but that's not the point here) for €400,000,000 (that's four hundred million, people, more likely six hundred).

At the same time, this munificent capitalist will bring in the gas and reduce our rates by 25% (that's less than a euro a day, incidentally, in most cases, but's that's not the point here, either). Just to demonstrate the heights of kindness to which our generous benefactor will soar (Gieh ir-Repubblika at least) he will then freeze the price for no less than ten years.

Within this framework, our Knight in Shining Armour will recoup his capital investment and, to boot, make a profit.And all of that, as it wasn't enough, ignores Muscat's sheer effrontery in asking us to believe that he can, with a simple wave of his Princely Hand, regally authorise a project of this magnitude and fly in the face of the legal obligations related to public procurement and environmental impacts, to mention but a couple.

Seriously? We're supposed to take all this at face value and not question it? Come on, pull the other one, why don't you?