Lawrence Gonzi may live to rue the day when he held back, last Thursday, from announcing an immediate election.

The crowd in front of him was quite evidently ready for the announcement, the hype, and the adrenalin flow that comes with it.

As seen on the television screens, the two crowds, the PN one at the Floriana Granaries, and the MLP one at Pretty Bay, were just about equivalent, but the real surprise was the PN one, coming after so many years when the only people who attended the Independence Day mass meeting were the real party diehards, generally middle-aged to elderly people.

It may well be that Dr Gonzi faced a wall of resistance from his party and the ministers, all of them intent on completing at least some of the deliverables they still hope to deliver by election day.

With so many deliverables stumbling to make it – the Regional Road bridge, the Mater Dei Hospital, the Waste Treatment Plants, the Ta Qali Crafts Village, and so on and so forth – and with the Opposition reminding people on a daily basis of this long list and on the many other commitments the PN government did not do anything about, the other promises that were not kept, the many computer mock-ups offered instead of the real thing, it is understandable that both the government and the party wanted more time, more time to deliver, at the very least something, anything.

And of course, there will be the euro party now, on New Year’s Eve, to kick-start the real campaign!

But in politics, as in life in general, as Dr Gonzi may yet learn at his expense, there is such a thing as grasping the opportunity, as doing what needs to be done when that thing needs to be done. Once that moment is over, the momentum lost, you can only hope that a second chance will present itself. Which is very, very, rare.

For the Opposition is now at its weakest. Its campaign is the weakest in living memory. Based on the assumption that it is now Labour’s turn, it MUST be Labour’s turn, it is turning any lessons in politics on their head.

For Labour is, or was until very recently, in the lead in all the polls. Now anyone who knows anything about strategic thinking in politics knows that it is only the party which is behind in the polls which attacks the other party, not the other way round. Instead of which it seems that all Labour cares about is to attack the Nationalist Party and the government.

More, having convinced itself it will win the coming election, Labour is not so quietly promising key posts to its people. Whatever the declarations to the contrary, this is the message that comes across not just on the video footage put on YouTube, but also through the constant harping that the present administration has put its cronies in all key posts. Unless Labour comes up with a clear commitment to be bipartisan in its management of the country (and not just with a generic commitment, either, but a clear, credible, checkable one), the country will always perceive all the current Labour hype as seeking to change one lot of people at the top with another lot. And that is, anyway, what any Labour supporter understands the party leaders to be saying. And, for all Labour’s claims it will be an administration that will deliver, who can really believe the next lot will be much better than this one, even considering the sorry shape of the present one?

Thirdly, Labour has made so many U-turns in the very recent past one can hardly be blamed for not remembering them all – the EU, of course, and the euro, and so on. It has learnt the lesson it cannot oppose what the country, rightly or wrongly, wants but it has still not learnt in what direction it wants to lead the country. Ask any voter, and the chances are he will say that Labour means ‘a new beginning’ but when you press and ask what new beginnings, and in what direction, the only reply you will get is that this lot will be kicked out and that lot put instead of it.

OK, so Labour is not against the EU any more, nor against the euro. But what is it for, unless, that is, it is for a government led by itself?

Labour has given itself a whole plank of proposals but even its media and its spokespersons seem somewhat shy to list them, to insist on them. And in most cases they take great care not to be specific or to propose anything drastically different from what is being done.

And lastly, at least for now, Labour has not seen that what is really needed to inspire trust and confidence, not in itself as it somewhat inanely seems to have concluded, but in the country, its potential, its future. How it can do that on the seventh day when it spends the other six insisting this country is going to the dogs is a great mystery but there you have it – you cannot say one thing every day without people drawing obvious conclusions – that either what you’re saying is patently not true, or that Labour just does not know how to stimulate growth.

For these, and many other reasons, Dr Gonzi, we repeat, may well live to rue the day he did not grasp the chance he had and called an early election.