As Joseph Muscat waddles from podium to platform to stage, en route to becoming prime minister in just over five weeks, Louis Grech has been padlocked into the cupboard with Toni Abela and Konrad Mizzi.

The Labour Party – now known as JosephMuscat.com because all evidence of the Partit Laburista has been wiped out, including its websites – is like a long-running episode of Big Brother. You never know who’s going to be kicked out or welcomed in depending on how popular the party’s advisers think they are.

They can’t head into an election campaign with somebody like Anglu Farrugia, who turns off their target segment of real and potential switchers, so they use a flimsy and spurious excuse to kick him out and install Louis Grech instead, having decided that Grech has switcher-appeal.

But as soon as Grech’s multifarious non-Labour admirers begin seeing him in active Labour politics and as part and parcel of the Labour Party, talking at meetings and all that, their opinion of him changes overnight. Their basis for liking him, you see, is the self-delusion that he isn’t really Labour. Even when they were busy voting for him to become a member of the European Parliament, they somehow managed to convince themselves that it wasn’t actually a vote for Labour. But of course it was just that.

There is another problem: Louis Grech is great in conversation but an utterly hopeless public speaker. And he makes for disastrous television. You can barely make out what he’s saying or what he means. So it’s straight into the cupboard with Grech, who is now being kept out of sight, too – or rather, he’s being flashed around like a footballer’s wife’s giant designer handbag, to impress on very special occasions, while not being allowed to open his mouth.

At Labour’s most recent mass meeting, it was Robert Abela – he who isn’t standing for election – who warmed up the crowd for the main event, the leader’s speech. But that’s traditionally the deputy leader’s job. So Robert Abela spoke, then Muscat read his bit off a foot-operated teleprompter, and then Ray Azzopardi – that complete fossil still acting as compere, because Labour treats politics like a performance of Gensna – cried the leader’s wife and the two deputy leaders onto the stage. Muscat rushed to hug Grech, and Toni Abela was left standing there like a jilted lemon, until Mrs Leader went up and hugged him herself.

I got the feeling that the risk is being calculated of getting rid of Toni Abela and replacing him with Robert Abela, the president’s son, who seems to be a marked favourite. They haven’t yet worked out whether it’s ‘wertit’ in terms of vote gains and losses, internal trouble and strife, but they’re clearly dying to do it because poor old Mr Potato Head (he really looks like him) is currently frozen out in the wilderness and even an obtuse person like him must be able to pick up the fact.

Konrad Mizzi is another one who’s somehow gone Missing In Action. He was all over the place in the first week of the campaign, telling us what a great idea it is to have a fantastic new power station, a whacking great LNG terminal and two vast storage tanks for gas. We looked forward to checking out his lipstick with each fresh television appearance. Now, he’s gone. The next thing we know, an announcement is made as to the districts in which the Labour leader is standing for election, and it turns out that he’s going to be competing with his Konrad on the fourth. Not that it’s going to hurt Mr Correct and Shame on You in any way, really – he’ll get the number-two votes and still be elected anyway.

 

Women need jobs, not childcare

 

The way the Labour Party talks about childcare as the sole means to the end of getting women into the workforce is beyond farcical. It’s first jobs then childcare, and not the other way round.

To listen to the Labour Party speak, you’d think there is a whole queue of people waiting to employ women over 35 who left school at 15 and who haven’t worked since they were 21. There isn’t. What women in this segment need is training, not childcare. They can get that training while their children are at school, because the hours are roughly the same.

The women whose skills and abilities are in demand are almost certainly in the workplace already. For the rest, childcare will make no difference. Divorced totally from policies on training for women and the creation of jobs, the grand offer of childcare is pointless. But that’s Labour for you.