At the moment the Prime Minister is like an old-fashioned sailor on deck with legs spread out signalling messages with two small flags for all he's worth. Except that he is not, of course, using old fashioned flags. The Nationalists have mastered the art of managing communications to near perfection. Lawrence Gonzi is building blocks carefully by slipping into his utterances seemingly ambiguous warnings about the challenging times ahead.

The game of politics nowadays makes a politician resemble a juggler in a circus like never before. Several balls have to be kept in the air at the same time, including promises, expectations and reality. The Prime Minister's hardest task is to manage the ball of pre-general-election promises.

He cannot pretend that the outlook for the unfolding year was not already showing in March. Then, close to the eve of the general election, Gonzi rashly promised to slash first round income tax receipts by some €47million. He expected government revenues to be resilient enough to absorb the cut with ease, aided by a secondary effect of higher consumer spending plus an incentive to increase the work effort, as the obverse of the theory that high taxes are a disincentive to effort.

The rashness lay in both assumptions, as well as in the context of the reality ball. That consists of the fact that no one can predict reality with certainty. The unfolding reality since the election has been worse than the Prime Minister perceived at the time. He is now left with the hardest task of all - to manage the ball of expectations in the context of his promises and the grim reality we all have to endure. Gonzi has chosen the ploy of trying to keep the balls of reality and rash promises in the air by seeking to manage expectations.

With the summer ebbing, he quickly showed that the chilled wine had well and truly dried up. A fortnight ago he focused on a scenario of important markets that were not doing so well. The Budget, he signalled, would depend on that scenario. Rather elementary, of course, but not in the context of expectations of a fulfilment of the promise to slash income tax burdens.

The communications game continued this midweek at a business breakfast organised by the PN as part of the management of communications game. The country should not fear challenges, said the Prime Minister. It should change what needs to be changed, even though that might "hurt a little". Let us "bite the bullet..." he urged, as reported in The Times.

Translated, that means the government feels it has to announce a package of measures in the forthcoming Budget which will not exactly be what the people were led to believe before the general election.

There might be some tinkering with the tax system, such as trying to make it more attractive for married women to take up or stay in employment, but there will be no sharp shifting of tax floor and ceilings, not at this early stage of the political cycle. There will, instead, be measures aimed at curtailing spending and increasing revenue. Health financing considerations might require some raising of the social security contribution rate. The VAT network might be revisited, to loosen some ends, which will not cost much, but tighten up on others which could yield quite a bit more.

The finance team will be wearing their brains out to see what proposals they can put forward, and how to wrap them up so that they would hurt as little as possible, including introducing economic pricing for water and electricity, while highlighting relief to lower-income groups.

The juggler will try to be as dexterous as can be, even as the perspiration will become visible along the road to building the Budget and in the Finance Minister's brow as he presents it to predictable ironical jeers from the opposition benches, and three-quarter-hearted encouragement from his own side.

The trouble with all this is that the reality test was ignored by the government before the general election, and could well be ignored by the opposition now. The government will find that the chickens of the Promises-Promises brand always come home to roost.

The opposition will be tempted to ignore the fact that, were it the government of the day, it too would face grave financial and economic problems. At least, it has the advantage of a new leadership which does not come into the act burdened with its own promises.

It will be left to the people to make a sober analysis of it all. People grow more cynical about politics by the hour.

Gonzi is governing as if he won the general election with a thumping majority, and as if he had the bulk of the people behind him. On both counts, that is not the case. Nor is it the case that the economy is doing as well as the first-impression GDP data suggest.

Those same data show that growth is government-expenditure driven and that such net benefits as are arising are being sucked away through transfers to expatriates, as the little-noticed Gross National Income (GNI) figures show. (To quote the National Statistics Office media release on GDP for the June quarter: "Considering the effects of income and taxation paid and received by residents to and from the rest of the world, GNI at market prices... for the second quarter was down by two per cent over the same quarter last year...")

The people do not go into arcane statistics, but they do judge things by the reality of their own experience. Communications management and spin might mix them for a while. In the end, they cannot fail to grasp the meaning of that reality. That will be demonstrated by the reaction to the coming Budget, as well as to the way the opposition criticises it.