With what alacrity Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi pounced on the by now famous words uttered by Tony Blair on the morrow of the general election: “I have listened and I have learnt…”!

One must really ponder what these words meant for the British Prime Minister.

Actually it was over a year ago that Mr Blair said he wanted to have a Big Conversation and with much fuss he started to meet people.

He thought he was listening, but later events showed he had not learnt, which resulted in a chastened Mr Blair coming out of the election with a far reduced majority; a government, which while strong with a majority of 65, is rather weak and most pundits are predicting he will not last the year as prime minister.

In fact, this is what he had to say after the election result: “I have listened and I have… learnt. And I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government. Life is still a real struggle for many people in this country… tomorrow’s pensioners are deeply concerned. I know that Iraq has been a deeply divisive issue in this country, that has been very, very clear.”

So, the master of spin, surrounded by princes of darkness and media manipulators, barely made it back to office even after declaring he was listening and learning.

Imagine what will happen to a prime minister who likes the sound of the words but misunderstands the whole meaning of listening and learning.

For this government has, it seems, a congenital inability to listen and to learn, to understand and to comprehend. Its problem is called the Anointed Son syndrome, much the same as that which afflicted the Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici rump government in the 1980s. Both Dr Gonzi and Dr Mifsud Bonnici were left in the lurch by their immediate predecessors who continued to overshadow them during their term of office. They were also lumped with the ministers they found. The succession, while containing the ritual of choice, was none of the sort: they were appointed because they had been chosen.

Once they were chosen by on high, whatever the people around them and under them may have thought, their real interest lay in fulfilling the will of him who anointed them. There was no reason to ask for the people’s opinion.

In this case, perhaps even more than in Dr Mifsud Bonnici’s time, besides fulfilling the will of him who sent them, there is also a not so secondary streak: that of governing by means of principles, theories, ideologies, etc rather than seeing what the people really wanted and needed. No, it’s the other way round: the people must be told what is good for them and made to accept it, much like children with cough medicines.

So how much listening can one hope for?

Tony Blair’s duology is instructive here: it is not enough to listen, one must also learn. Some have pooh-poohed the most recent initiative of the prime minister, to hold meetings for citizens at Castille and listen to what they have to say, like Charlemagne under the tree. It is easy to get bogged down in trivia and equally easy to have such meetings degenerate into special petitions for particular cases, or be taken over by NGOs each relentlessly advancing its own agenda.

There are, obviously, other ways to listen, rather than through such long and probably confusing meetings with citizens. One hardly needs to emphasise that those who pluck up enough courage to ascend the steps of Castille are by no means representative of the Maltese people. Public opinion surveys provide much information, if properly evaluated, but even more so by going out and about and mingling with the citizens and looking at the whole situation from the point of view of real people. It was this, rather than any spin, which really converted Blair and which made him a humbler and less arrogant person.

Blair said on Friday of last week: “I have been struck again and again in the course of this campaign by people’s worries that in our country today, though they like the fact that we heard: never mind the trumpeting of ‘targets met’ and ‘initiatives’: at the very bottom, many things just don’t bloody work. Buses. Hospitals. School discipline…”

Of course, Mr Blair had – has – problems of his own, the war in Iraq especially. But precisely because he had such huge obstacles, the fact he turned the country around into voting him into office for a historic third time, means he forsook spin and spin doctoring and listened and learnt.

What this country needs is not a prime minister who mouths what other prime ministers say but who does what other prime ministers do, especially those who are re-elected in the face of incredible difficulties.