STRANGE BREW

Darn. It's out. It wasn't Alfred Sant who spread the word about the Pullicino Orlando story too late to win the elections for the Labour Party.

Nope, it was the Nationalists themselves.

Don't take my word for it: take Joe Muscat's. More precisely, take his word for it as reported by L-Orizzont, that paragon of all journalistic virtues.

Thus was it reported in Monday's edition of that particular paper.

Now, I'm not sure what concerns me more: the fact that Muscat really thinks that the Nationalists were so weirdly insane as to prejudice the advantage they had clawed back thanks to Sant's predisposition for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory or the fact that he was so wildly misinterpreted not by the opposition media but by his own camp. I know which I think is the version closest to reality.

Let's analyse this.

According to what Muscat was reported to have said, a few days before the General Elections, the Nationalists, who were leading in the polls after having reversed a deficit of quite a few thousands, thought it would be a good idea to risk chucking away that lead by breaking a story guaranteed to alienate a whole bunch of people.

And this just to deviate attention from a load of other issues which were about to see the light of day and win the day for the Labour Party.

If this crackpot scheme had been proposed as a storyline for a radically satirical parody of a political soap-opera, the producers would have asked the writers what they were on and then told them to take a long walk on a short pier.

Quite apart from anything else, we don't even have any idea - not even the slightest hint - what deep, dark secrets the Nationalists were trying to keep, erm, deep and dark.

And there we all were, thinking that it was only Anglu Farrugia who was seeing dodgy electoral wheezes under the bed.

Sometimes, you have to wonder what it is about Labour. Let slip the Lil'Elves.