For around 20 years I’ve practised a policy of never writing about the budget in its aftermath, and this year is going to be no different. I don’t exactly know why this is, but I think it has something to do with my instinctive feeling that when people have spent a couple of days reading and hearing figures and percentages dissected in news reports (the proper place for them) and television discussions (ditto), they really don’t want to read about them in a newspaper column too. So what I generally do is talk around the edges, a bit of detail here and there about what has struck me as annoying or curious. And again, this year is going to be no different.

What I found most interesting – other than the numbers, of course – is the fact that the Labour Party in government has, with this budget, followed exactly the same marketing strategy and tactics as it did in the election campaign. We had the structure set up in Palace Square for the prime minister’s press conference, purely for lighting/framing purposes because the structure itself was not shown in TVM’s broadcast, but only the contents. Those contents involved the prime minister, with the deputy prime minister and the finance minister on either side of him, all standing at lecterns, backed by a strange mix of people that included a couple of members of the cabinet, some backbenchers, and random young people, all shiny, cheerful and brightly lit.

The entire thing seems to have been art-directed, as the campaign videos were, by film-maker Mario Philip Azzopardi, with the picture we got on screen framed to show those at their lecterns, backed by seated individuals ranged behind them, with the floodlit facade of the Palace as a backdrop. That evening, it was largely wasted because by that time most viewers were worn out after listening to the budget speech and had tuned out. But I am quite sure this footage will resurface as part of a campaign propaganda video either this June or at the end of this government’s term of office.

Then there are the billboards, each of them displaying a single different message about different measures in the budget. Of course, they don’t give the detail, but just the headline – the message – that we are supposed to absorb and repeat. And so we are told that the government has increased students’ stipends, but we are not told that this is by only €16 a year. That’s one example. There are several others. This form of single-messaging via billboards is what Labour used in its electoral campaign. It clearly believes it is going to be just as useful and effective in government, even though the context is now entirely different.

The oddest tactic in this dogged repetition of the successful electoral campaign strategy was the prime minister’s staged and televised visit to an ‘ordinary family’ , where he sat in their kitchen, round their kitchen table with the rest of them – with no visible sign of a pot of tea or a cup of coffee – and ‘explained’ the budget to them. This was a digital copy of his visit to another ‘ordinary family’ in the election campaign, where he sat in what was practically the same kitchen, also with no food or drink on the table, and ‘explained’ things to them. The only crucial difference between that visit and this one is that this time Joseph Muscat was not accompanied by his wife.

For some reason, I found all that sitting round the kitchen table phenomenally irritating, even more irritating than the North Korean idea of filming the leader visiting an ordinary family and imparting his great knowledge to them.

Given that both ‘ordinary families’, the one used this week and the one used in the election campaign, had the prime minister into the kitchen, we just have to conclude that they were actually instructed to do so by Muscat’s management team, who think it makes him look ‘natural’. Actually, it just makes him look patronising.