In a thriving democracy it is vitally important that the government – especially one which has such a commanding majority in the House as Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s – should have an effective Opposition to hold it to account. The Opposition should be seen as the government-in-waiting. Unless the electorate regards it in that way, the Leader of the Opposition, Simon Busuttil, has failed in his job.

What should be his New Year Resolution? Being the Leader of the Opposition is the most thankless task in politics. All that the Opposition leader has is a voice. He has no capacity to act. He has to strike a balance between whingeing complaints and constructive proposals. Responsibility without power is never easy.

Busuttil’s job as Opposition leader has been made doubly difficult by the unholy political and financial mess he inherited on becoming PN leader. He has a battle to fight on two fronts.

First, he must lift the party machine out of near-bankruptcy and get it working effectively again to recruit disillusioned foot-soldiers back to the cause. Secondly, he must ensure that the party machine is there to support him organisationally in order to concentrate on his key target – the Labour administration –without his having constantly to look over his shoulder.

Busuttil as party leader and Chris Said as secretary general have a vital task in re-building the party organisation. There is a crying need for institutional reform to make it more relevant not only in its policies but also in the way it is financed and communicates its message, in the expansion of its membership base and the role played by its members in the formulation of its policies. Unless this happens, attracting sufficient funding to stave off bankruptcy and to enable it successfully to fight an election (including the European elections in May) will be severely handicapped.

Money – an essential element for success in politics – will only flow in if the PN begins to look and sound like a potential winner.

What was once a formidable electoral campaigning machine has lost its way.

There is an image problem which needs to be addressed. While the new policies the party adopts could do much to alter people’s perceptions, there would also be considerable merit in modernising the way it presents itself to overcome its fusty historical baggage and to demonstrate clearly through its policies that it is no longer a prisoner of its past.

To rebuild the party successfully, Busuttil must confront unflinchingly the reasons for its historic defeat last March. There was no single reason, but a combination of reasons. All stemmed from a toxic mix of hubris and political arrogance. There seemed to be a belief that the PN had a divine right to govern. The leadership grossly underestimated their opponents.

Yet the writing had been on the wall for several years. Gonzi PN looked like a government not only out of touch with the economic pressures and concerns of ordinary people but also appeared to care not at all about them. This perception was given added impetus with the exposure of the corruption, sleaze and cronyism which had been going on for several years under the government’s very nose in one of the most strategically important areas of Malta’s economy.

Add to this mix the manifest and bitter internal party disunity and the breakdown of internal party discipline and the PN’s fate in the election was sealed. The widely held public sentiment was that the time for change had arrived.

Busuttil’s major New Year’s resolution must therefore focus on re-inventing the PN and winning back the trust not just of its core supporters but of the country. He has not done so over the last nine months, but has seemed content simply to wage a form of guerrilla warfare on the government (not always ineffective, as the cash-for-citizenship debacle showed) but without presenting anything new to show that the Nationalists are on the road to change.

There has on the whole been too much shooting from the hip, not enough constructive criticism to demonstrate that he is a Prime Minister-in-waiting. A Leader of the Opposition has to do far more than simply count on the electorate’s narrow vision and the government’s mistakes. He must show what is best for the country in the long term to return PN to power.

To do so, he must concentrate on three crucial areas of reconstruction: leadership, party organisation and, most importantly, policy.

Leadership is key. Increasingly, Malta’s style of politics has become presidential. The brand of the charismatic leader around whom the future success of a political party turns has become crucial to success. Political leadership consists essentially of one man or woman waging a battle for the hearts and minds of men and women. There is not yet anything to show that this is happening under Busuttil. I am not yet convinced that the presentation apparently of a triumvirate of PN leaders quite succeeds.

Nor does his distribution of shadow portfolios to all and sundry. Busuttil should choose now the major players who will comprise his front-bench team as the future government-in-waiting. He should get rid along the way of ineffectual and time-expired volcanoes. He must ensure he has people of calibre around him.

As leader, he must be capable of taking on board the lessons of the last election and inspiring the party by re-instilling discipline and its desire for power. Beyond this, he has to reach out to the country at large and demonstrate through his party’s new policies that a Nationalist government under his leadership would be different from what it was in 2008 to 2013. But also that it would be markedly different from Labour.

He should get rid along the way of ineffectual and time-expired volcanoes

Neither charismatic leadership nor good organisation, however, will achieve this unless the party’s product – its policies – inspire people with hope of much better governance and a better future.

A structured series of comprehensive, wide-ranging policy reviews into every aspect of government business, dealing with the economy, environment and social issues should be instituted to draw up new and coherent policies to align the Nationalist Party again with modern Maltese social dynamics and aspirations.

Time is currently on his side. He has four years before he will be asked to present a package of fully formulated policies. But this work should start in earnest now.

He has to find the best minds in PN (the likes in the 1980s of Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, “a thinking colossus”, and then-young Turks Michael Frendo, Michael Falzon, Richard Cachia Caruana, Louis Galea and others) to re-energise the party’s thinking and to make it credible again to as wide a cross-section of the Maltese electorate as possible.

Only a fundamental reassessment of its policies, its abandonment of its outdated conservative baggage and the adoption of brave new initiatives in areas where Labour has stumbled (such as meritocracy, the structure of government, hunting and the environment), and where it can make clear blue water between the two parties, will see it emerge once more as a party fit for government. This must be Busuttil’s New Year resolution.