Dr Alfred Sant is at it again. He is putting on his faux poker face and making promises he has no intention of keeping. For those willing to resort to it, bluff works if you were never caught out before.

Now it is true. Some of the voters going to the polls in a few weeks’ time were two-year-old toddlers when Dr Alfred Sant became leader of his party. When Dr Sant promised to remove VAT they were five years old. When he invented CET they were getting ready for their Holy Communion. When the country gave him the sack with the certificate of least successful Prime Minister in Maltese history, they were eight years old with little time for politics. They were fumbling 13-year-olds who barely noticed Dr Sant proudly flagging his referendum voting document and celebrating the great victory of the “partnership” over EU members.

New voters have known Dr Alfred Sant all their lives but up to now they were too young to care. To these younglings with no patience for history lessons, Dr Sant is promising a new beginning. He’s backed by a troupe that ran a police state with violence, prohibition and intervention back when today’s new voters hadn’t even been a twinkle in their father’s eye.

Still it is wrong to simply dismiss Dr Sant’s promises on the basis of the amply justified claim that he didn’t keep promises he made in the past. His promises are to be taken for what they are: commitments by an aspiring party leader who thinks he can be Prime Minister.

He has been promising for some time to halve the surcharge, not bothering to tell us how. Forgive me if I give perhaps excessive importance to this subject because I probably have to admit that the surcharge is more on my mind than on the mind of most consumers out there. I know I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working out ways of cutting the surcharge down to the level it is today.

We’re paying a 50 per cent fuel surcharge to pay for fuel processed from crude oil selling for some $100 a barrel. To match Dr Sant’s 1997 electricity rates we’d have to increase the surcharge to 97 per cent. He had introduced those prices when crude oil traded for lows of $12 and highs of $19 a barrel. First he said he will reduce the surcharge by half. Now he says he will remove it entirely, never saying how long he’d keep it that way, and, more importantly, how he would pay the difference.

And now, the earth-moving explanation has finally arrived. Labour promises to find oil under our waters, Sant told the press this week. Ah, well then. How silly of us not to think of it first. Look at us buying oil from the world markets when we could have been an oil rich state all along. The point of bluff is it works only as long as you can stretch it but Dr Sant has just suggested that he has a hand of five aces, three of them of spades.

You would admire the guy for not blinking if there was not the credible prospect that the unblinking party leader who promised to remove VAT and then became the unblinking Prime Minister who replaced it with CET might become our country’s leader again.

Sometimes the poor acolytes around him balk under pressure. Dr Sant improvised a political commitment to abolish tax on overtime. Now why would that make sense, the country asked? Again he bluffed through glassy, expressionless eyes until Dr Charles Mangion broke into a sweat and conceded that the unspoken other half of that commitment would mean reducing over-time rates to hourly rates of normal working hours. Aha! Dr Sant read out the appealing top half of a Thatcherite treatise and hid his brief when it came to the less appetising lower half.

I confess some amusement at Labour saying the first set of the PN’s election billboards were unacknowledged copies of Sarkozy’s electoral campaign when Labour’s policy on over-time is a misread and improvised adaptation of Sarkozy’s policy proposal to reduce the cost of over-time for employers. It should perhaps be pointed out that France’s working week is considerably shorter than ours but Labour failed to notice that policies (as well as party billboards) are to be developed for the native context for which they are made.

At the end of a busy campaigning day, this week I came across a One TV programme discussing Labour’s zero tolerance on bad governance. That subject is worth going into in a separate article but a specific question by the obnoxious anchor is worth repeating here. He asked “how important is it to be honest in politics”? Unsurprisingly the chorus reply was that honesty is fundamental. Indeed it is.

We looked Dr Sant in the eye five years ago and wondered if he was honest when he celebrated the victory of “partnership”. The country called his bluff.

Now Dr Sant is trying to hold our gaze again with promises of a free ride under a Labour government. But there cannot be more than four aces in a single hand.

Dr Austin Gatt is Investment, Industry and IT Minister