When someone passed the plain brown envelope to me in the dead of night, I could not wait to get home to open it and read what was in it. Walking at a brisk pace, my mind was teeming with anticipation: in my left hand I had the document – actually 16 recommendations – which would explain to us common mortals why the MLP lost the 2003 general election.

Kept under lock and key for almost two years, I was looking forward to finally revealing the shining truth on Bondiplus last Tuesday. This, I thought, was going to be the programme's cherry on the cake as this television season cruises to its conclusion.

What a bloody let down! The document, penned by Godfrey Grima, Fr Rene Camilleri and Joseph Mangani in August 2003, is a piece of fluff, skirting the real issues which have been dogging the Labour Party for the better part of a decade and a half. In turgid prose, it does everything but analyse the real and fundamental reasons why the party lost five out of six general elections over the last quarter of a century. And a referendum on EU membership to boot.

It is not that the report has no redeeming features. Arguably, it makes some rather sensible suggestions. It recommends a reorganisation of party structures and the appointment of a low-profile chief executive who would, literally, take care of business. It calls for the appointment of a permanent “strategy group” which “regularly monitors … the party's image and its closeness to the people, or otherwise”. Inter alia it also recommends that the MLP farms out its public relations functions.

The bottom line, however, is that all the report's recommendations apparently fell on deaf ears at MLP headquarters. But not just. The party actually went for the jugular of the Nationalist Party for daring to adopt one of them itself – the creation of a “strategy group”.

Yet these are pathetically marginal issues considering the scope of a report that had a mission to enlighten the MLP on the reasons why they lost the 2003 election. The report should have been a clinical, no-holds barred, political analysis of a party which had repeatedly crashed at the polls over a quarter of a century. It was nothing of the sort.

Let us start with the basics. In none of the report's 16 recommendations covering several pages is the MLP's militant opposition to EU membership raised as a reason for the 2003 defeat. Indeed, the word “Europe” is totally absent from these pages. As anyone who lived in Malta during the EU referendum and the election hot on its heels knows, Europe was the electoral be all and end all. Neither of the two parties even bothered to shift electoral gear between the referendum and the election. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the PN would have been re-elected had the Labour Party been pro-EU membership.

And yet Grima, Camilleri and Mangani sail blissfully over the EU issue. It is as if the MLP's bizarre “Switzerland in the Mediterranean” concept which then morphed into the even more bizarre “Partnership” idea had no impact on the electorate; as if the electorally suicidal decision to refuse to accept the result of the EU referendum did not rub people of all political stripes up the wrong way; as if Alfred Sant's surreal referendum mathematics, the counting of dead men's votes and declaration that il-partnership rebah had failed to register in people's minds. Without Europe, this report is akin to an analysis of the market performance of corporations like Coca Cola or Microsoft without looking at their products and the nature of consumer demand for soft drinks and software.

Secondly, none of the report's recommendations goes into the specific nature, attitudes and operations of the MLP leadership, particular Alfred Sant himself. The MLP leader's systematic smear campaigns, his penchant for ostracising anyone who is not a yes-man, the exaltation of a hatchet man like Manwel Cuschieri, and so on, do not feature at all in the Grima, Camilleri and Mangani analysis of the electoral defeat. Neither do Alfred Sant's policy u-turns on VAT, Mater Dei, political party participation in local elections, the existence of the Gozo Ministry and other matters.

Indeed, the analytical vacuousness of the report goes further. Before 2003, Alfred Sant railroaded the party into declaring a completely unjustified boycott of Where's Everybody programmes. I have never met anyone, not even in the MLP – and I speak to most of them – who agreed with it or thought that it helped their party. After the election Charles Mangion, the MLP deputy leader, went so far as to say that it was one of the main causes of the 2003 defeat.

So what is the reading that Godfrey Grima & friends give to the electoral consequences of the boycott against Where's Everybody? They fail to condemn it outright, relegate its importance as a factor and just stop short of suggesting that it should be retained. When I read this, I chuckled at its predictability. It tallied perfectly with Godfrey Grima's contorted argument justifying the boycott prior to the 2003 election. For all their airs of worldliness, some men never escape the pull of the provincial village square. To their credit, the MLP ignored the Godfrey Grima et al advice and unceremoniously removed the boycott soon after the election.

The apex of the report's analytical surreality is reached in the final recommendation, which states that the MLP should not wait for the next election to test the party leadership's 'performance'. They recommend that an Extraordinary General Conference is called around mid-term, more or less now, precisely for this purpose.

Well, irony of ironies, such a party conference was called last weekend. But it was not quite the testing analysis of the leadership's performance that the report's authors had in mind. Rather, it was a divisive, emotional and rambunctious display of the two unresolved political issues which caused the electoral defeat in 2003 – Europe and Alfred Sant's leadership. Precisely, the same two issues that Grima & friends left out of their recommendations two years ago.

I have always been sceptical of electoral post-mortems commissioned by political parties from so-called “independent” men and women. Unless they have sharpness of mind, guts, honesty and a sense of balance in equal measure, what the party gets in the end is one distorted picture or another. Specifically, this report fails because it skirts around the real political issues behind the MLP's 2003 defeat. Instead it engages in a lot of promiscuous waffling and bombast about the need for party “fragmentation” to be turned into a force for good and for it to “strengthen its credibility and to be more circumspect in its thinking and its moral leadership”.

Throughout, the Grima, Camilleri and Mangani report suffers from one crippling flaw: it analyses the Malta Labour Party as if politics is incidental to its performance. It is like asking Mrs Abraham Lincoln, “Apart from your husband's assassination, how was the play?”

It is a report written by men who decided to remain deaf to the loud rumble prior to electoral defeat.

[email protected]