Last Sunday’s article was built around the hope that we might all focus and keep our balance in the coming election.

It was not to be. As one can see from the comments received, that hope was received with scorn and disdain. The PN grassroots are up in arms and spoiling for a fight.

The same fighting spirit was very evident in the PN leader’s words to the sizeable crowd in Sliema that same morning. And it continued all throughout the week in many other speeches, culminating in Dr Busuttil ripping up the Enemalta contracts in Parliament.

I don’t blame him, for this government keeps piling mistake upon mistake, at all levels and on all fronts. It seems incapable of getting anything right, or of retreating once it understands it has made a mistake. Ever since Konrad Mizzi was outed as having an account in Panama and the Prime Minister, squirming and twisting, refused to sack him, the country has been sliding down a steep slope.

The coming election is thus to be fought on one issue: Government (PL) corruption. This was clear from Dr Busuttil’s words last Sunday and all subsequent speeches and actions by PN. It is also the subject of this afternoon’s demonstration in Valletta.

I questioned last Sunday whether corruption basis enough for an electoral campaign. There was, it’s true, the MaltaToday survey which showed a sizeable majority thinks there is corruption in Malta. I would have expected a concomitant survey to show that corruption is the number one issue in the eyes of many people. In the absence of that, we know that many people feel there corruption is rife in Malta, but we still do not know if those people think this is the most important issue in Malta in 2017.

So what we’re going to get in the coming 12 months is a relentless campaign by the PN on the Muscat government corruption. Not to be outdone, the PL spin machine will come up with its own list of PN corruption, past and present, proven or otherwise. That is what we are in for over the coming year.

It may even get worse. I seem to detect in the present controversy about media law, permits for online sites, registration of media, and so on, all the prerequisites for a civil disobedience campaign which will make Poland’s crisis look like chickenfeed in comparison.

There was no need to get here. The Daphne Caruana Galizia-Chris Cardona quarrel has passed and now awaits resolution in court. Ministers Bonnici and Bartolo reignited the issue by mentioning Caruana Galizia’s blog as the reason for the strictest media law this side of Azerbaijan.

Those of us who lived through the 1980s know this is how Labour DNA works: instead of seeking a resolution and compromise, it goes for exacerbation. There was no need, back then, to kick the doctors out of St Luke’s or to sack those who obeyed a union directive and absented themselves from work. In both cases, Labour was solidly in office and a compromise could have been found had there been the will to compromise.

Simon Busuttil is increasingly becoming an updated version of Eddie Fenech Adami, the Eddie of the 1980s and the mammoth meetings, the intransigent Eddie on the road to Tal-Barrani.

At the same time, and I find this fascinating, Simon Busuttil is getting to sound more and more like Joseph Muscat, the pre-2013 one. He is gathering a movement around him, over and above the party he leads, and he is making much the same noises about honest government and the like.

I know Simon believes in what he says, which is hardly what we think about Joseph Muscat today, and I know there is no fourth floor at the PN headquarters, as the PL seem to have had, where commitments are made against cheques.

But it is impossible to guarantee that in a big party there will not be a rotten apple or two (or two thousand or twenty thousand). Nor is it possible to manage a government, whichever side wins, where every appointment is ipso facto suspect, where every contract is micro-examined to see if there is any whiff of corruption anywhere.

Things have now come to such a state that we no longer discuss but shout at each other, and whatever the two parties might actually agree on is drowned out.

The sooner the election is held, the better. But I fear we have a whole year of this ahead.

 

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