The clunking, slipshod amateurism of anything and everything associated with the Labour Party drives me round the bend. Forget policies. Set aside the violence of the past. Leave the crackpot approach to Europe for a moment. Turn a blind eye to the ongoing freak-show of blasts from the past and hapless, hopeless, sub-literates from the present.

What really gets me is that they can’t do the simplest thing right. The devil is in the detail, and when even the most basic things are royally messed up, you really don’t want to entrust anything major to such crass incompetents.

It looks like Labour leaves the organisation of projects and communications initiatives to cub scouts on bob-a-job week, teenage chavs, or somebody’s mother who has a bit of spare time in between sweeping her ghatba and tlesti l-borma. Let’s face it, if they thought Marisa Micallef is a communications supremo and an akkwist who will help sweep them to power, that says much about how her (non)contribution to the Nationalist Party’s success was logged over at Labour HQ. They didn’t even get that one right.

I am left bug-eyed with disbelief at the Labour Party’s mammoth incompetence – as when, during the last general election campaign, Super One held a televised fund-raising marathon to pull in money at precisely the same time the Labour Party held its biggest ever mass meeting on the Floriana granaries. As Norman Hamilton sat there haplessly in the Super One studio trying to drum up funds with letters written by people saying they will never vote PN again (all in large capital letters and felt-pen, so that they could be read off the screen) you could tell that it had dawned on these smooth operators a little too late that 50,000 Labour supporters were standing on the fosos screaming Viva l-Labour, rather than sitting in front of their television sets at home and ringing the donations number.

Then there was that business when somebody with a Big Brain came up with the idea of taking the now infamous image of a Labour ballerina (mittilkless aspiration) originally designed for a billboard and using it for those giant cubes they chose instead of poster-boards. U ejja, mhux xorta: instead of redesigning the image to fit the cube, so that there was one ballerina on each of the four sides, they wrapped a single large ballerina around the cube, so that if you approached from the north you got an eerie hand waving at you, and if you approached from the south you got an amputee.

Now there’s the Labour Party’s counter-offensive to my website www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com – because in their sparrow-minds, it is a Nationalist blog and I am a Nationalist politician and co-leader of the PN, rather than just another person who votes PN and who, like many thousands of others, thinks Labour is a dangerous joke.

As with that ‘Stop Project Piano’ campaign organised so transparently by Labour elves in their secret grotto, they haven’t worked out that it is impossible to have credibility or to be effective when you are anonymous. It is still more impossible when you are anonymous, sub-literate, have little or nothing to go on, can’t understand the mechanics of successful mockery and wit, and have the mental age of 10 – but let’s leave that for now.

When you are anonymous, you are ridiculous. The only exceptions are when anonymity is the result of an oppressive environment in which there is little or no freedom of expression and the real fear of extreme violence or death if you speak out. Anonymity in Malta in 2010 is the fruit of cowardice, embarrassment or both. Cowards are universally despised, even by their own kind, but the Labour Party hasn’t worked this one out yet.

But there’s more. www.tasteyourownmedicine.com appears to have been set up in a different time zone, but is administered in Malta. The Giant Brains who administer it here haven’t yet worked out how to adjust the time settings to CET. The net result is that the site looks like a gathering-place for nocturnal zombies and insomniacs who haven’t taken their medication (or people who live in North America, like the star of the internet, Denis Catania), with the vast majority of comments logged between 1am and 5am. And then, of course, we have the blog-posts which are uploaded complete with ready-made comments, something which is beyond hilarious in its ineptitude. If they’re going to fake comments, I recommend they wait a while before uploading them.

Then there is their obsession with my appearance. You would think that, like Helen of Troy, I am planning to devastate the Labour Party with my looks, rather than what I have done for the last 20 years, which is pick it apart with my wits. To my readers, it is irrelevant whether I am ugly, beautiful or boringly ordinary. What matters is whether I make sense and can string a decent argument together in an entertaining and informative way. I can do that from a wheelchair, with scars all over my face and a bald head. Of course, I understand that this is all part of the general strategy to make me out as an evil witch. And witches, as we know from childhood fairytales, are ugly. But then here we go again, with the Labour Party undermining its own message of progressive modernity by revealing the fact that it thinks in pre-Enlightenment terms (woman, ugly, witch, burn her) and believes its audience does likewise. And that’s to say nothing about the fact that, because I am not invisible and do occasionally leave my home, when people see me after reading Labour’s ‘evil witch’ propaganda, the first thing they do is wonder what in God’s name they were on about, making the Labour Party seem rather more foolish and desperate.

As for Maltastar, the English-language face of the Labour Party, it just beggars belief. The amount of negative publicity it generates for Labour is unquantifiable, and I speak here as a professional and not as a PN voter/gONziPn SpINDokTir/friend of CHarLes CrROwFoDR and GOrDOn Psiani. I am not talking only about the content, which is poor enough. There is a far more damning message which is picked up from the subtext of bad writing, pidgin English and interesting use of punctuation marks.

Maltastar’s leading articles (what some know as the ‘editorial’) appear to be the work of teenagers from educationally deprived backgrounds, who seem more intent on playground jeering than delineating the policies and objectives of the Labour Party which might persuade us to see it in a new light. The leading article is crucial, because it is the ‘voice’ of a news medium. I have monitored Maltastar’s leading articles over several months, and on that basis I can say that Maltastar’s voice is that of a brainless teenager of the sort pilloried in Southpark.

I cannot work out why, for example, the people who write Maltastar’s leading articles use interrogation marks instead of full-stops, so that these childish panegyrics read like a litany of questions. I suspect it is because they are affected by too much viewing of E!, Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model, and think that cool people who speak English end all their statements with an interrogative lilt. Or perhaps the answer is simpler still: the full-stop and question mark are immediately adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard. Either way, this is clearly the wrong sort of voice for the Labour Party.

Perhaps it is because this is the field in which I work, but these are the things that really drive me nuts about Labour. They drive me nuts because they are so easy to sort out and avoid, but that takes it for granted that they are genuine errors and not the inevitable result of deeply ingrained and widespread amateurishness in the Labour Party. If the slipshod errors and the roughly cut corners were just mistakes due to haste, mistakes which are corrected when they are noticed, it would be one thing. But the truly worrying aspect of all this is that the people in charge – are there any people in charge? – don’t even begin to understand which mistakes are being made and how and why they should be sorted out.

By putting Labour’s communications in the hands of Kurt Farrugia and Jason Micallef – two men who can’t even begin to understand the people they need to communicate with to garner those highly desirable ‘floating votes’ – Joseph Muscat has done himself no favours. They will only undermine him. They haven’t even managed to work out that I am a perfect fit with the voter profile they are so desperately keen to attract – which means that if they repeatedly miss their target with me, they miss it with thousands of others. If I laugh out loud at Maltastar’s editorial voice, then so do the vast majority of AB voters. What Kurt Farrugia and Jason Micallef fail to understand is this basic truism: I am not unusual, but typical of my kind. I think like other AB voters. The difference is that I articulate those thoughts, while they tend to keep quiet. Since Joseph Muscat appears quite keen on undermining himself – going to China with Alex Sceberras Trigona, for example, thereby prompting a slew of North Korea wise-cracks – it is no surprise that he has failed to notice just how much harm Kurt Farrugia and Jason Micallef are doing to the party by broadcasting its ineptitude.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com