The most fundamental rule of cross-examination is never to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. If you ignore this rule, you run the risk of uncovering facts which may very well sink your case. Pretty much the same rule holds true for parliamentary questions, as the PN parliamentary group found out recently.

The Government has made some questionable decisions – not least a number of appointments, its ambivalent attitude to hunting and the worrying declawing of Mepa

Following a salvo of parliamentary questions about every euro cent spent on cars bought, leased, serviced and garaged by the Labour Administration, the PN thought it had come up trumps when it elicited the news about Prime Minister Joseph Muscat being paid an allowance of €7,000 per year for using his own car on official duties.

Wannabe PN number two Beppe Fenech Adami could hardly speak at this outrage. “This is sleaze,” he trumpeted. “These are signs of decadence and in bad taste,” referring to Muscat, who he accused of turning his car into a money-making business.

I’m in agreement with cutting the fat and carrying some kind of review and cuts on the thousands of tax euros being spent on ministers’ official and unofficial wheels, but is the PN the right party to be talking about decadence and waste?

If we’re going to stick to the subject of taxpayers’ money spent on prime ministerial cars, maybe Fenech Adami and Co should have a look at what Lawrence Gonzi’s car cost the State during his term in office. The BMW 7 series originally cost €62,254. However, it needed €36,335 worth of repairs and €21,782 were shelled out on renting out replacement cars while the BMW was being repaired, for a total of €58,117, nearly doubling the cost of its acquisition. This figure excludes fuel costs. The BMW is now garaged because it is considered too costly to run.

With figures like these you wonder whose eagle eyes were scrutinising expenditure from the public purse under the previous administration; certainly not the current PN car inquisitors.

I suppose the barrage of parliamentary questions of this kind is intended to show everybody that the PN may be down but not out – a show of fighting spirit. But this lies at the core of the PN’s defeat, the fixation with criticising Labour and contracting selective amnesia when it comes to its own shortcomings.

The Labour Government has already made some questionable decisions – not least a number of appointments, its ambivalent attitude to hunting and the very worrying declawing of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority – and yes – we do need an Opposition that is alert. However the attacks on the Labour Party should not be the only raison d’etre of the PN.

In a comment about the parliamentary questions above, former Nationalist MP Jean Pierre Farrugia summed it up aptly when he quoted an article by Francesco Saponara about the current woes of the hopelessly fragmented Italian Democratic Party. The article was entitled ‘The PD is more concerned with its adversaries than with its detachment from the electorate’.

Loosely translated, this is what Saponara wrote: “Instead of concerning ourselves with what our opponents are doing, let’s try to improve our standing within society”. That’s precisely what the Nationalist Party should be doing at the moment.

• One of the unwitting stars of the local social media scene was the young potato farmer who featured in the promotional video for Maltese potatoes. The farmer in question is disarmingly and endearingly sincere in his praise for the potatoes he cultivates. He describes the back-breaking work carried out by the farmers in the fields as each tuber is picked from the soil. The farmer’s work is a labour of love – and the final product is proof of this.

Without going overboard and over-romanticising the whole concept of locally-grown produce and its excellence, the potatoes grown in Malta are definitely a cut above their foreign counterparts – a million miles away from the smaller stony specimens that are sometimes imported, or the ones which resist hours of oven-roasting and refuse to transform themselves into the crackling goodness of patata l-forn made with Maltese potatoes.

The farmer’s passion shone through his words, and when he said he had potato in his blood or that you could taste the sun and the church when eating potatoes grown in Malta, you knew exactly what he meant.

Unless you were completely literally-minded and totally immune to the unintended poetry of his words, it would be clear that what the farmer was referring to was the link between the particular terroir and the lore of potato farming that had been passed down from one generation to the next.

However some people insisted on ignoring this aspect and persisted in sneering at the farmer’s occasional grammatical lapse (“Potatoes in the blood? – ha-ha”). In so doing, they ignored the fact that the former’s raw honesty and his unpolished grammar were precisely the ingredients needed in a promotional video of the sort.

If you’re pushing potatoes, the last thing you need is slick yuppie-speak and people going on about ‘unique selling points’ and ‘product evangelists’. What you need most is authenticity and this potato farmer delivers in spades.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt