I honestly cannot understand why the Leader of the Opposition accepted the invitation to go on Xarabank and face the prime minister.

I am not saying this because I feel he was roundly defeated on Friday. He wasn’t. Read all the analyses that were written and, apart from the usual ones who either praise or damn the Leader of the Opposition, the more balanced ones offer a more nuanced analysis in none of which they say that Dr Busuttil lost the match. (For a rather objective analysis, even if it is from the man who was PN’s communications guru before the election, read http://frankpsaila.blogspot.com/2014/03/analizi-tad-dibattitu-bejn-muscat-u.html?spref=fb).

But I honestly cannot see any advantage for the Leader of the Opposition to face a kangaroo court such as he did on Friday, not even for all the gold in the world.

Let me try and list the disadvantages:

Dr Busuttil was playing, in football terms, away. At least two or three times a week, the PN makes official complaints against PBS and its newsroom regarding alleged lack of credibility and fairness in its reporting.

Xarabank under the present government has been evirated and reduced to either song fests, feats of prestige, whodunits, and so on. This maybe was also the case under PN, but there was no control over who was allowed in and at some points they were barracking the PN leader like a crowd of people at a blood sport.

The supposedly ‘neutral members of the audience’ who were allowed to speak have had their identities revealed and they turn out to be Labour activists (and much else). And one question in particular had a possible nasty undertone with regard to Dr Busuttil that I am sure everybody understood and which was not stamped out by the moderator.

To my mind, there are only two places where a Leader of the Opposition is safe to measure up to the Prime Minister:

Parliament, which for all accidents, has a structure and a time-honoured custom allowing interplay between majority and minority; and

The much criticised Broadcasting Authority 1970s structure which measured in seconds and with no interplay from the audience the contributions of both leaders.

Otherwise, the Leader of the Opposition would be wiser to stick to party events and appearances on his own TV and on those shows with a modicum of fairness and an assurance that the audience behaves itself.

Apart from playing away under such circumstances, the Leader of the Opposition must realise that he is facing a Prime Minister who is a master of repartee, the quick jibe, the shallow riposte, the non-sequitur.

And he is being watched by a population that has so lost its power of discernment that it rejoices at every quick-fix reply which does not tax its brain unduly. This was the population that became hooked on the structured and modulated delivery of the pre-election campaign that it put its propounder in office and gave him so much power.

It has long been clear to many, except to the political leaders, that the Xarabank formula of swift questions that require swift replies militates against any serious discussion of any issue, let alone, as on Friday, an all-encompassing review of a government over one year.

I can find only one reason why a Leader of the Opposition should accept to go to Xarabank and that is to rile and unsettle Dr Muscat, which in a way Dr Busuttil succeeded in doing on Friday.

Here was sweet revenge, for Dr Muscat did exactly that with Lawrence Gonzi: time and again he got under his skin and Dr Gonzi was all the worse for it.

Dr Muscat does not have the patience Dr Gonzi had and he is very quickly needled – and that is where he is at his worst, at least as apparent to all except his adoring fans.

To come up with a list of alleged contracts Dr Busuttil’s legal office obtained from the PN government might have been effective politics in Dr Muscat’s mind, but surely that is asking Dr Busuttil to come up next time with a far longer list of contracts awarded to PL sympathisers. But to hint that any malfunction on the gas tanker could be PN sabotage is surely unacceptable. However, that is precisely the point; this was a debate without a chairman who would otherwise rule it offside.

Dr Busuttil still has a long way to go and I feel he must get going.

The party first. The party is not out of its financial mess and the people who worked for it and have been sacked are still clamouring for their due. They are being treated very unfairly.

The party’s campaign next. I ask readers if they have been reached by any of the party’s candidates, for I have not and many people I know have not either. The MEP hopefuls trudge from one press call to another and go to little huddle meetings where they meet the same convinced supporters who come up with many complaints about the past administration.

I met an MEP hopeful who in one and the same breath told me he does not agree with the party’s strategy and yet expressed a horror of ringing more bells of people’s homes.

I said it months ago and I say it again today: the party must shake itself loose from the people which led it to lose the people’s support and which led it, open-eyed, to its nasty fall and defeat. The choice of people on the Shadow Cabinet, which is the Leader of the Opposition’s prerogative, still shows him to be too soft when it comes to putting people out to grass. This also goes for people in the party’s internal structure and its media as well.

In conclusion, many of the points Dr Busuttil made on Friday make a lot of sense but trying them on Dr Muscat was a non-starter. It is the public that should be targeted, not the Prime Minister who has an answer for everything (and you still know he is not right).

There is no need of Xarabank to get your points across. And surely there is no need to test them on that master of dialectics Joseph Muscat to ensure the people grasp the points you are making.

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