If Joseph Muscat is the expert prodigy and Evarist Bartolo, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca and Michael Falzon are the suffering but loyal servants, George Abela is the prophet who would be king.

Last Sunday, Dr Abela went to the Cospicua Regatta Club to do nothing less than make the blind see, the deaf hear, the festering wounds heal and the crippled Labour Party begin to walk again. Even for a prophet, this can be tricky.

Dr Abela's record is better than Cassandra's. Within the Malta Labour Party, he was not just right on whether to go for an early general election in 1998 and on EU membership, the two single, most important issues that the party has faced over the last 10 years. On the former, he managed to get the MLP delegates to believe him. Beyond the party's grassroots, he is seen as the most credible leadership candidate.

But, unlike a prophet, a leader needs to be able to move from clairvoyance and persuasion to securing the political result. Dr Abela's record in asserting control over political machinery is patchy. On the one hand, he scores high in the comparison between his results as deputy leader and those of his two successors.

On the other hand, despite persuading the party delegates of the folly of an early election, he still lost the vote. Despite feeling secure in his influence over the General Workers' Union in 2000, within the year he had lost it.

Perhaps the odds were too great. But it has led to mutterings that he lacks the nerve and ruthlessness for a dogfight. By stating that he will run for the top post even if the vote is restricted to the party delegates (making the contest much more difficult for him), Dr Abela hopes to lay this lingering doubt to rest.

From here, it gets trickier. The sheer number of contestants for the leadership - as well as the talk of others who might yet enter the race - indicates the fluidity of conviction among the delegates. No single candidate so far has been fully convincing.

But Dr Abela has so far failed for a reason that distinguishes him from the others. The latter fail because of some intrinsic trait that they cannot get rid of.

Dr Abela, however, is shackled by an accusation: the mortal sin of disloyalty. No matter how right he was about the folly of an early election, he is accused of having made things worse by leaving the party.

If he can persuade the delegates that leaving was not betrayal but rather a deeper kind of loyalty, he will throw off his shackles. And if this happens at the same time that Dr Muscat, the man to beat, has his vote eroded by the sheer efforts of four or more other contenders all nibbling away at his support, Dr Abela may find his stock rising suddenly from the 100 or so delegates' votes (out of circa 900) he probably can muster now.

In seven weeks, it may just happen. But the prophet has to persuade his electorate that he was not the sinner but the one sinned against. And to do that, as Dr Abela himself told his Cottonera audience on Sunday, the party needs to turn upside down what it has believed about itself for the past 11 years.

Or rather, as he might put it, the truth that was stood on its head needs to be placed on its feet again. Disloyalty had actually been loyalty. The real Labour Party had been shifting towards EU membership; the five years of virulent resistance to membership have to be understood as a nightmare, in which the real position was hijacked.

The difficulty with making this argument persuasive is that it threatens to render meaningless all the efforts, the sweat, the thrills and torn guts, tears and heartache of the party faithful who struggled to win the 2003 general election. The composition of the delegates today is largely the same as five years ago. Dr Abela has to persuade them without throwing them into personal turmoil.

Which is why, even as he was urging people to use their minds and not their hearts, he addressed their flesh, senses and blood. Dr Abela's rhetoric was that of the healer who takes on the wounds of those in his care. I suffered, he told them, to see you suffer. The choice of Cottonera as the meeting place was surely meant to show how he could close the gaping wound opened there in the turbulent summer of 1998.

With the largely middle-aged and elderly crowd gathered that day, the words appeared to work. While I overheard several men mutter that they were owed an explanation, they also appeared satisfied that it had started coming.

The question period had an air of a revivalist meeting. People prefaced their questions by identifying who they were and where, so to speak, they were coming from: "I am so-and-so, and used to be a delegate..." They asked questions but sounded like they were giving witness, that they had felt lost and now were found.

With some questioners, I suspect the effect was by strategic design. But that only goes to show that Dr Abela has grasped the nature of the challenge before him. He needs the delegates to give him not just intellectual assent but a bodily one.

He faces a steep uphill struggle. However, his description of Labour's "real position" on Europe, at least before 1998, had been by Tuesday endorsed by one of his rivals, Mr Evarist Bartolo. Indeed, Mr Bartolo confirmed that subsequent anti-membership position was not based on conviction but on political accident - the "lack of trust" that the MLP had in the Nationalist Party.

Until last Sunday, Dr Abela was still being rated a non-starter by some Labour politicians in touch with the delegates. Then, in three days, Dr Abela dismantled the MLP narrative on Europe and established a new one. Not bad work for three days, even for a prophet.

ranierfsadni@europe.com