When Tonio Fenech challenged Konrad Mizzi (wearing what appeared to be pink lip gloss) on Bondi+ a couple of nights ago, about where Labour plans to build its gas storage tanks, Mizzi brushed him off.

So at a press conference yesterday, outside the Marsa power station, a journalist asked the same question of Mizzi’s Great Leader, Joseph Muscat. His reply: “Maybe Tonio Fenech has had a vision of the Madonna.” Amusing, isn’t he? He must really light up a party. I always wonder what it must be like to have to live and work with people like him: wall to wall cutting remarks that are an exercise in deflecting the real issue, or punishment for getting in the way of whatever it is they want to do; a false smile to mask a bottomless well of stone-cold selfishness.

But Muscat is planning on becoming prime minister in two months’ time, so the guise that occasionally slips from his profound egocentricity is not really the issue here. That issue is his failure to answer a pertinent question. You cannot run a gas-powered plant without massive storage tanks, and yet the Labour Party – at least in what it has revealed of its magic plan – has failed to factor them in either in terms of location or, equally crucially, money. They will cost millions, but who will pay for them? Oh, please don’t say “the private investors” because it’s really worrying how the Labour Party still thinks that businesses make money by turning on a tap in their backyard.

There’s more beyond the gas tanks: gas tankers. And that’s another question Magic Mizzi failed to answer. The gas that goes into the storage tanks at Labour’s undisclosed location, to feed the power station (location ditto), will not miraculously appear in Grand Harbour or Marsaxlokk like Sarcastic Joe’s Madonna. It will be shipped in, in tankers which need special berthing facilities, especially when they are coming in on a regular basis to feed a power station. The berths, like the storage tanks, will cost millions, and like with the storage tanks, Labour has been silent on where the money is going to come from. Perhaps the party has yet another corporate rabbit in its mad hat?

And of course, all that is only going to be necessary because JosephMuscat2013 won’t wait for the negotiation of EU funds for the laying down of a gas-pipeline between Malta and Sicily – because it’s more important to promise people a €100 cut in their electricity bill by tomorrow, like his ex boss Alfred Sant promised to remove VAT, and steamroll the economy into the skip in so doing.

It’s like CET, but worse

If Alfred Sant had told us back in 1996 that he didn’t actually plan to remove VAT but to replace it, and that he didn’t actually know what with, then he would have never won that general election. He and his crazy plans would have been torn to shreds. Instead, he entered Jerusalem on a sea of palms, riding on all those donkeys who believed his Orwellian garbage. And then a sea of trouble rolled in.

Back then, people thought, ‘Oh well, one government introduced VAT and another government will remove it and we’ll be back as we were before. Simple.’ Except that it wasn’t. If they had known that Sant planned to replace VAT (they were told, but didn’t believe it) they would have asked plenty of questions, and then the fact that Sant and his stupid party didn’t have a clue what they were doing would have shown up early, before it was too late. Even Lino Spiteri would have been spared some embarrassment, though quite frankly, I don’t know why he was so annoyed about being bypassed in the CET mess, so annoyed that he resigned, when nothing about PM Mintoff and PM Zero seemed to bother him, so much so that he was quite happy to be their minister.

JosephMuscat2013 cannot do the same with their plans for cheaper electricity tariffs. They can’t say ‘we’ll just remove them and get back to where we were before’. They have to give the specifics. And now that they’ve given bits of the specifics, certainly not the lot, perhaps because they don’t even know them themselves, they’re being torn to shreds. That’s the way it should be. That, my dear Labour friends and enemies, is democracy. Politicians tell us what they plan to do, and we take those plans apart for inspection. You may love Mintoff, but the days when things were done by his methods are long gone. They belong in another world called Behind the Iron Curtain.

The only fulsome praise for the Mad Hatter’s Guide to Reducing Electricity Tariffs, sponsored by the Queen of Hearts and heavily promoted by the White Rabbit, has come from the Malta Employers Association. The praise was, indeed, so very fulsome and unstinting that you just knew there had to be something going on there, and that it was just a matter of looking.

So I looked, and immediately found Konrad Mizzi’s father on the Malta Employers Association council, to which he is also a consultant (how does that work?) and to whose president he is a long-time advisor.

What do I always say? Labour: not fit for purpose. Now here’s Daphne’s Magic Method for Making Sure You Use as Little Electricity as Possible: chuck a live electrical appliance into the bath while you’re in it. It’s probably less painful than voting for this ship of fools.