Time to get those masks on, guys, Carnival has rolled around again. Forgive me but I won't bother, this time, it's too cold and wet.  Muscat's party needs to find itself a better fitting one.  Mask, I mean. The one they've had on up to now has slipped.

The first bit of slippage came when Anglu Farrugia spilt his guts all over the Sunday Times.  Just to get my retaliation in first, for when the LilElves and Peculiar Pundits trundle into motion and call me all sorts of names for suddenly becoming Farrugia's fan, I've never, and don't now, agree with his politics.

But the stark fact remains, however painful it is for Muscat's party, that he was treated shabbily.  You don't slap someone on the back and generally beam approval on him and then slide a stiletto between his shoulder blades, smiling sweetly.  Yes, fine, Farrugia's remarks were ludicrous but do you really believe that this was why he was dumped? Really?

And what do we say now about the tired old dirge that Doctor Alfred Sant (sometimes to be confused with Doctor Joseph Muscat) used to intone at the drop of a hat?  Friends of friends and all that?  Pipers' tunes being called by the paymasters?  Not so vote-grabbing is it, now that Labour has become all buddy-buddy with Big Business?  It explains quite a bit, doesn't it, about where the money is coming from and about why MEPA is to become MPA?

The second bit of slippage came when we given a taste of some behind-the-scenes audio of the negotiating style adopted by the General Workers' Union, long known to enjoy "most favoured nation" status with the Labour Party.  Shades of Xmas presents to come, don't you think?  You get pressies, but only if you make nice to the people who really count.

And so to the third, catastrophic, slippage.

The author, sorry, co-ordinator (or do I mean architect?) of Muscat's Electoral Programme, no, sorry, Manifesto, no sorry, Road-Map, Karmenu Vella went on Bondi+ to explain it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he was the epitome of ineptitude. 

He was unable to explain the nuts and bolts of any single proposal about which I heard questions put to him.  All he managed to do was sneer at the presenter for finding difficulties all the time, which I would have thought, even under the Broadcasting Authority's inane strictures, is precisely what Bondi should have been doing.

Pressed for answers, to the extent that one can in the light of the BA's insipid world-view, all that Vella could come up with was the pious hope that in due course, arrangements and agreements would be made, though the how, the when and the how much of it it was left dangling in the void. 

And that's leaving aside that a hefty number of the proposals are already works-in-progress, cribbed from what the PN has proposed or downright silly.   I mean, one of the proposals is that "we will be proud of Valletta in 2018”, which at least has the advantage of being easy and cheap to do.  It's one that will be fulfilled, I'm sure.

So there we have it: an electoral programme geared to being best buddies with contractors, with deals made in restaurants as long as you're mates with our mates, and an inept Cabinet of Ministers letting Muscat do exactly what he likes, even assuming anyone figures out what it is he's going to do.

The mask is off, and we can see what it is that lurks beneath.

But of course, some people will still vote for them, because forty years ago, the Malta Labour Party decriminalised sodomy.  Not homosexuality, they didn't need to, just sodomy, at pretty much the same time they decriminalised adultery.  

Which I suppose will get them every two-timing husband and every tennis-coach humping wife's vote too, using the same logic.