During a Xarabank programme, the outgoing PN general secretary came out strongly in favour of the idea mooted by certain Labour Party members of having a party leader being elected by all paid-up party members instead of by party delegates or councillors. Yet he fell short of declaring whether he would lobby for such a statutory change in his own party before stepping down from his post, although admittedly the PN do not have an imminent leadership change in the pipeline.

But given his newly discovered feeling of "openness" the least that one would have expected from him would have been to push for statutory changes so that as in the case of all elected Labour Party officials - from the president to the secretary general and the financial secretary amongst others - the Nationalist Party general council will as of now elect all party officials.

On the contrary, the PN chose to stick once again to its long tried and tested formula whereby the new secretary general will be elected at the end of next month when the party's new executive will meet.

The Labour Party national executive recently unanimously agreed to publish on its web site the findings of the unanimously appointed members of an election result analysis commission - well ahead of the eventual leak of the same document to the media. Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg was reported to have stressed last Friday that a detailed analysis should be made in the coming months by the Nationalist Party, obviously to examine why its level of popular support was eroded in spite of its having won a relative majority of votes. We anxiously await a commitment from the PN leadership as to when the report will be drawn up, by whom it will be prepared and most importantly whether they will follow in Labour's footsteps by publishing the full unedited version of its findings on their own website.

If they do so I will be the first to congratulate them for it. Even though they seem to have stubbornly refused and chosen to miss the bus in failing to "open up" the way in which their secretary general is elected.

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