The debate, last week, on that populist television programme Xarabank between the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader was as predictable as it was boring.

The Prime Minister was abrasive and cocky and came across like a schoolyard bully. He didn’t look or behave like a prime minister, and maybe that’s because he wasn’t preceded by a troupe of North Korean children singing the national anthem. He looked bored, like his heart was not in it. He actually said so in an interview before the debate: it was all in a day’s work for him.

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil came across as a serious, no-nonsense man, more befitting of a prime minister than an Opposition leader. He was humble, principled and on numerous occasions stressed his willingness to cooperate and be positive. He wasn’t colourful. The debate didn’t make for entertaining viewing, which is what Xarabank is all about.

The Xarabank show waned away fast, reaching rock bottom when some Labourite in the audience, thinking he was being clever, asked Busuttil about a coffee shop. That didn’t draw any laughs; it just created an uncomfortable situation. Muscat thought it was a clever question because he tried to ride on it, with equally dismal results.

Then came Arnold Cassola who caused more than a whirlwind. In just 10 minutes the Alternattiva Demokratika chairman did more than the presenter did in that over-stretched debate that never really got started. He got the two leaders to express, or come close to expressing, their positions on the hunting referendum, on party financing and on immigration. And he did it all in style.

Anyone who knows Cassola personally knows that his was not a show. That is how he is, with his humour, his sarcasm, his sharp mind, his clarity of expression and his way of reducing issues to an understandable level and with practical examples. Cassola is middle class through and through and yet he can get through to those working class hordes that vote Labour and who clearly have no idea anymore what their leader Muscat is talking about because they have long lost the plot that once was Labour.

Cassola spoke on the economic growth the Prime Minister boasted of and what that meant to the average wage earner – zilch. He expressed the public’s contempt for the passport sale scheme, poured scorn on the red carpet treatment being given to foreign millionaires and did so with a refined cynicism that Nationalist voters could share and appreciate.

He used football as a popular example of how citizenship could be used positively. And he spoke in realistic, understandable terms about what a tanker filled with gas would mean for Marsaxlokk, for its residents and its fishermen. He even linked it to Malta Freeport, which he said would be closed seven times a year for the gas storage tanker to be refilled.

Trying to sound smart, the Prime Minister quipped that ships destined for Freeport didn’t go into Marsaxlokk.

“Where then, St Paul’s Bay?” snapped back Cassola.

Muscat was stunned. He met his match in the leader of a minuscule party who was given just a token slot in a televised debate Muscat thought he could dominate with his usual rent-a-crowd. His supporters shouted “Joseph, Joseph!” at the end of the programme, thinking that would round up the debate in triumph. They should realise that the days of leader-messiahs are over.

Muscat’s populism does not work with middle class voters he tries so much to woo because he does not speak for them, act like them or even talk like them. Busuttil and Cassola do that naturally. Busuttil got hell once for saying that Labour candidate Deborah Schembri had a “Nationalist face”. The truth is that such a face exists.

Muscat’s crude, snide remarks and his wisecracks don’t work any longer because he is now Prime Minister.His supporters love them though, because they understand them as they understood the equally crude metaphors of his predecessor Dom Mintoff.

Muscat’s populism does not work with middle class voters he tries so much to woo because he does not speak for them, act like them or even talk like them

Busuttil kept his gloves on most of the time. Evidently Labour’s criticism that he is negative about everything is getting at him, when it shouldn’t. There is much to be negative about, most especially over matters that were not on Labour’s scam electoral programme.

Busuttil let pass Muscat’s boast he sold shares in bankrupt Enemalta to “one of the biggest companies in the second biggest economy”. In reality, Shanghai Electric Power is a subsidiary of China Power Investment Corp, a company owned by the biggest non-democratic country in the world.

Busuttil did say however that Muscat liked rubbing shoulders with dictators, so why did he not go the whole hog and point out the glaring obvious about China? Handing the power energy sector over to the communist Chinese government makes many people uncomfortable, Nationalist supporters especially.

Shorn of the comfortable stage management he is used to, Muscat is terribly unimpressive. When cornered over the Marsaxlokk gas tanker issue, he turned to Busuttil and asked him what he would do in his stead.

Busuttil’s reply was a classic: “You are in government, shoulder your responsibility. The Prime Minister wants his answers from me now!” It felt at that moment like he was handing Muscat the rope to hang himself with. Unfortunately, we would all swing with him.

Cassola didn’t pull any punches, though. After Muscat boasted everyone knew where he stood on issues, Cassola nonchalantly said Muscat was pro-business and “in the pocket” of businessmen who financed his electoral campaign.

That drew a warning shot from Muscat who told Cassola to be careful what he said. But Cassola did say it, and Busuttil did not.

When he came on, Cassola had everything going in his favour. He played the underdog card beautifully, throwing in a concerned look at presenter Peppi Azzopardi when the audience clapped (not for him), saying the clapping was costing him precious seconds. Busuttil could never pull that, it is neither in his character and nor should he, as he is the alternative prime minister and is clearly aware of it.

With Cassola there on stage, Muscat was at his weakest. By default, Cassola and Busuttil together brought back hope that there may still be an educated and mature majority out there that finds Labour’s foreign adventures and its populist policies repulsive. There is hope of a majority out there that considers itself European and thinks European, and that it does not share the buccaneering mentality of Muscat that is so typical of his ilk.

There is hope that conservatism, with its deep-rooted belief in human and civil rights, can embrace liberal thought and wrench it away from the tentacles of a Labour Party which has its grassroots sunk deep in intolerant, myopic and isolationist thinking where the fast buck, and not political principles or values, count.

Cassola is a liberal in the wrong party because AD has always been a non-starter. He is wasting his time there. His short presence on Xarabank brought in sharp contrast the incredible differences between the two major political parties he repeatedly tried to equate with one another. And that was his weakest point, because the PN and the PL are not the same and it came across very clearly, thanks to Cassola.

No one won the debate and no one could because Muscat and Busuttil speak to different worlds. It was a clash between Labour cleverness and Nationalist intelligence, and it was obvious which side of the fence the AD leader would sit more comfortably on.

Like a true academic, Cassola waved a green pen throughout his short intervention. Many a viewer must have wished it were blue, which is Cassola’s true home.