The reaction by the two main political parties to the outcome of yesterday week's local elections put the old shadow over statistics to shame. It was to be expected that the parties would give different and differing interpretations. But not that the politicians would produce versions of indelible reality that twist it almost completely out of shape.

The basic, inescapable fact arising out of the result is that the Malta Labour Party won the elections hands down. The victor's garland does not depend on how many eligible citizens do not bother to pick up their voting document, or on the droves of those who did have a voting document in hand, but choose to suspend their right to express themselves through their vote.

Victory in the local elections goes to the party that gains most seats out of the valid votes actually cast into the ballot boxes. The MLP got 53.2 per cent of those. The PN received a miserable 43.9 per cent. Labour ousted the sitting Nationalist majority in three of its former strongholds, and added to its total of local councillors, while the Nationalists, shedding 6,660 votes from the local poll of 2004, lost a few councillors, including one to Alternattiva Demokratika.

End of that particular story and no two ways about it. The mysticism - as in "of hidden meaning, or mysterious", even "occult" - started when the parties began spinning a broader picture. That charge does not apply to Alternattiva Demokratika, which contested only a handful of carefully selected localities, and did relatively well in them, garnering around ten per cent of the valid outturn therein. AD's small band of committed activists expressed satisfaction.

And why ever not? They are still a considerable distance from suggesting they could gain a full quota in any single constituency in a general election. Even so, the fingerpost is pointing in that direction. It suggests that a considerable proportion of disaffected voters who bother to express themselves are quite aware that they can demonstrate their mood by voting AD.

Rather significantly, AD snatched a councillor from the PN in Attard. The MLP, always in a minority in the village of the Saracens, did well through its hardworking minority councillors. But not so well as to gain the place lost by the PN.

All of that calls for a focused review by political analysts, both of the detached kind, as well as those within the parties. There is nothing to suggest that the two major parties are making that particular analysis. I would be surprised if, behind the scenes, some of the party thinkers were not carrying it out, as part of their overall critical self-examination. What they come up with publicly is another matter.

The nationalist party - top down, bottom up, with the sharp exception of former Minister John Dalli - transmitted the impression that either they are living in a bad state of denial, or they think that people are easily taken in. They hurried to put up the easy excuse available in the fact that there was a very low turnout, ignoring the salient point posited by Mr Dalli in his column in this newspaper before anyone knew what the ballot boxes would tell.

It was a simple point, but very telling: if voters shun the PN despite the government's rosy claims, there has to be a deep reason, which should be dug out. The Prime Minister and leader of the PN was in no mood to do any digging, unless it was at the Opposition. Emulated by his party's secretary general, Lawrence Gonzi showed scant interest in his party's poor showing.

In grim tone he declared he was not concerned with local elections. He was taken up with the SmartCity project, which would yield thousands of jobs, and with giving Malta the euro, he cried. Nobody bothered to say - yes, Prime Minister, but... Nor to point out that he had flogged the SmartCity horse and euro prospect to a pulp in the run-up to yesterday week's poll, but evidently a strong majority of voters had not been impressed. Why?

Dr Gonzi was not about to answer that. Instead he rushed on to declare that he was going to win the general election. At a time when the team is lying defeated in the mud, a leader has to rouse it and try to rally it. Whether that is best done by arrogating to oneself prophetic powers, and speaking with cold certainty about the general election result, is another matter.

The Nationalist leader did not bother to try to suggest an explanation as to why more people than usual did not pick up their voting documents, and many, many more did not cast it. He simply swiped at Labour, pointed out that the MLP too had lost votes, moving on to make his prophecy about the 2008 general election.

His party team followed up with a rush of figures and arguments which, remarkably, seemed to be meant to ignore their latest among a string of electoral defeats, as well as simultaneously to synthesise them into a hypothesis of certain victory when the whole country goes to the poll.

In its turn the MLP duly claimed a famous victory, and in itself, it was. Somewhere or other its leader was even understood to have said that the party had increased its votes. That was further mysticism, from across the other side of the great divide.

Labour has every reason to claim success in the electoral tests of public opinion held since it again tasted the great bitterness of a defeat in the 2003 general election. The party would have been less than human had it not rubbed the PN's face in the mud for all it was worth, plus some more. And also to feel fresh wind in its sails as it prepared to cross the potentially treacherous waters of the remaining 15 months or so leading to a general election.

Yet the Labour leader and his troops competed with their Nationalist counterparts in ignoring the question Why? In Labour's case that has a different emphasis.

Both main parties need to answer the question why did so many voters refuse to pick their votes or, if they did, to cast them. Another big question for the MLP to deal with is why it garnered 3,326 fewer votes than it received in the comparable 2004 local elections. The answer cannot lie in the EU issue.

That was decided through the 2004 general election. Labourites who gave their first preference to a PN candidate to vote for EU membership thereby, would have done so with great regret. They would have been expected to try to make up for that by selecting Labour candidates on the local election ballot paper.

The decline in the MLP's total of votes received in 2007 was mostly caused by other factors. One would have anticipated an increase, and not a decrease, in the Labour vote. The Nationalist government is reeling on the ropes, very much in a winter of discontent with no sun of York in sight to turn into glorious summer. The campaign by the MLP was hard and harsh, but also slick. All the big guns were blazing throughout, led in every battle and over each barricade by Dr Alfred Sant.

Why, then, did the Labour vote not only fail to increase, but actually fell?

Such questions are for the parties to mull over. Very probably, out of one or the other side of their mouth they will say that they are party affairs, and not those of outsiders. They cannot say the same thing about the thousands of eligible voters who very deliberately turned their back on their democratic right to vote.

Using electoral statistics to paint political surrealistic pictures is one thing. Ignoring the quest to find out why a third of the eligible electorate ignore all political parties in the 2007 local elections, is very much something else.

I remember it well

Memory is a funny old mechanism, particularly when one is not, umm, quite so young any more. Mine rapidly goes to sleep whenever I tell it to remind me I should do this or that when I get to the next room but one, only to come alive when I am somewhere else a mile or two away. Yet, it seems able to navigate the deepest of wells when it comes to the past.

When I began narrating to my computer some of my experiences as I wended my way through politics, I found that my memory was able to recall in stark detail episodes of my early childhood, even as I regularly forgot to secure the windows before I turned in for the night, the only chore entrusted to me in our household.

I recalled meeting my political role model, Dr Albert Hyzler, when I was five and he had yet to dip a toe in politics; and my first practising politician, better known as the honest great poet, Karmenu Vassallo, by the time I was seven. That was all of 60 years ago, plus a bit.

Remembering my role in the politico-religious dispute of the Sixties and Archbishop Michael Gonzi's dread of what havoc he feared I would wreak on this poor island when my beard got to grow regularly, my marriage in the sacristy, the sad days I spent as a Cabinet minister, the naughtiness in the 1992 contest for the leadership of the MLP, was easy as well.

Memories of yesterday rose into a flood that begged to be taken at full tide, even as I regularly forgot names of close acquaintances I ran into on the street today. My computer was all ears. It showed disappointment that I chose to forget what I did not want to remember, though it perked up when it realised that I do remember that which is not at all easy to forget.

The outcome was a motley collection of memories, by no means an attempt at full-blown 'memoirs'. My faithful publishers, PEG Ltd, put them together in a rather handsome hardback whose main highlights, really, are Dominic Fenech's introductory comments, and the post-modern design conceived by Pierre Portelli.

The effort will be launched on Thursday at 6.30 p.m. at the Hilton Conference Centre. Those of my readers who might care to join us should be stimulated, at least, by the comments about the book that will be made by Fr Arthur Vella, SJ, Dr Martin Zammit, Joe Sammut and Noel Grima, co-ordinated by Professor Joe Pirotta. A glass or two of wine will follow.

Sapienza's have been kind enough to invite me to their bookshop in Valletta to sign copies of the book for others who might call by this coming Saturday, between 11 a.m. and noon.

I believe I remembered whatever I have written quite well. I wouldn't be surprised, though, that there might be some who might beg to differ.