Joseph Muscat at a recent Festa Frawli in Mġarr. Photo: Pierre Sammut/DOI

You’ve got to hand it to Labour, they do have a road map after all. It is not to be found in that blue-skies, green-pastures swindle of an electoral programme perversely titled Malta Tagħna Lkoll butit certainly exists. Slowly, the package is being unwrapped by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat who decides what we need to know, when and what we should not know.

He’s very Mintoffian in style and just as scary because you really do not know what to expect next from him.

Under Labour, it is impossible to tell truth from reality. Labour can slash energy prices without building a power station in order to do so.

Labour can peddle European passports that attract talent but the new, anonymous Maltese need not come to Malta to bring their talent. The economy is in overdrive and, yet, the number of people on the poverty line is rising.

It all seems so surreal. As John Lennon put it in that 1960s psychedelic song Strawberry Fields Forever, nothing is real.

Muscat’s announcement of a €200 million investment during last week’s Times Talk was both disingenuous and offensive. He truly likes to treat his electorate as idiots and, yet, so many love him for it.

The spin started with a €200 million investment in the Gozo hospital by Queen Mary University, purely out of the kindness of that university’s heart. To help Gozitans make an extra buck, the university was also to bring over hundreds of foreigners and their relatives to rent places and lavish money on Gozitan bars and restaurants. How incredibly colonial.

The story was then changed. It is not the university that will invest in thehospital but someone else who is still to be identified. Muscat didn’t say who it is but he conceded last Sunday that it will be “foreigners”.

Another clarification to the initial announcement said that the government is still to issue a call for expressions of interest and that those fantastic €200 million are not for Gozo alone but will be shared with St Luke’s Hospital.

And now Health Minister Konrad Mizzi, not known to meet deadlines, is saying that the €200 million investment is not a done deal. He had to say that, of course, because with the Prime Minister throwing around a specific price tag, he has raised suspicions that a deal has already been made, before the call for expressions of interest.

One would have hoped that after the Café Premier debacle, Labour would be a bit more careful. But clearly all caught up in its own spin, and intoxicated by Muscat’s runaway success, Labour is actually more careless to the point of arrogance.

Needless to say, there is no mention in Labour’s electoral programme that the Gozo Hospital will be privatised.

But, then, there was no mention of privatising Enemalta, or that civil unions will translate into gay adoptions, or that people can change their sex through a mere notarial deal, or that in a few years our Budget will depend on the sale of EU passports.

Labour won’t even stick to its electoral programme on apparently neutral issues like organ donations. Malta Tagħna Lkoll says that, after a period of public consultation, Labour would pass a law on organ donations that would be based on “expressed (informed) consent” that respects the choice of the individual.

The White Paper just published instead comes up with four options, two of which require people to opt out of donating organs, meaning that if they do not, the government would help itself to their body parts when they die.

For anyone with any self-respect, this is truly a case of over my dead body. But try explaining that to the average Labour voter, intoxicated by the cheap fuel fumes at our petrol stations and who thinks that the recent price cuts are all thanks to Muscat’s benevolence and not a reversal of the hedging mess the energy minister made. Also not on Labour’s electoral programme was the legalisation of marijuana. Immature liberals who want to blow their mind (maybe to forget the foolishness of voting Labour?) have cheered the ‘radical’ ideas included in the new drugs law.

Under Labour, it is impossible to tell truth from reality

Now it turns out that, thanks to pressure from our police force, if you get caught with marijuana for personal use you will not ‘just pay a €125 administrative fine’.

The police will want to talk to you to find out where you got the drug from. That means a nice interrogation at police HQ, a deterrent, if there ever were one.

For once, I find myself on the side of the boys in blue. And as for those liberals who believed the rhetoric of the ever-smiling, soft-spoken Justice Minister Owen Bonnici, let us hope they have second thoughts about some weekend, 1960s-style tripping in Gozo. They may end up at the police depot, after all.

The problem with Labour is that truly ‘nothing is real’ because the messages it sends out are as confusing and contradictory as Lennon’s Strawberry Fields.

Everything is subject to change, to the Prime Minister’s whim, if the populist wind starts blowing the wrong way.

He overrules and humiliates his ministers publicly, reversing their decisions and ignores all protocol. When he gets it wrong, he assures us that he is still learning on the job, two years on.

The only thing the Malta Tagħna Lkoll Prime Minister can be relied upon to reciprocate is loyalty, blind loyalty to him alone. Turncoat Cyrus Engerer, who wrote a book glorifying Muscat and is described by Wikipedia as “a convicted revenge pornographer”, has ended up with an ambassador’s €85,000 salary pack in Brussels, where his boyfriend works.

Former journalist-turned government concert organiser Lou Bondì, a thorough Beatles fan who probably regularly plays Strawberry Fields on his electric guitar, must be another latter-day loyal fan of the Prime Minister. His government appointment appears to be safe, as is rocker and billboard boy, William Mangion, whose service to this country is unquestionable.

The sad thing about all this is that none of the above will dent Muscat’s apparent invincibility.

He has managed to strike the right chord with a good majority on the island and the fear is that he is heading for another electoral victory come the next local council elections. He may even pocket a Yes vote for spring hunting.

It is evident that turncoats, switchers, latter-day liberals going through a midlife crisis and first-time voters still refuse to see the degenerate style of the government they voted into office.

Too tired of those boring and arrogant Nationalists with hidden Swiss bank accounts, they are still hoping against hope that Muscat will deliver what he clearly cannot: a proper and decent government.

One day, the delusion will set in and I would not like to be in their shoes.

Once I was a fan of Lennon. I liked his rebel sense. I was sad the day he was shot outside his New York home in 1980 and, yet, already then, I had a nagging feeling about him that I did not like.

I didn’t like his song Working Class Hero, being instinctively repulsed by anything working class. I liked him even less when he sang of “no possessions” in Imagine. It sounded so hypocritical, coming from a millionaire. He was nothing more than a champagne socialist.

For years, I refused to see Lennon for what he was. Many are having the same problem with Muscat today.