We all know by now that the Labour Party has suffered three consecutive electoral defeats. What we forget is that they come hot on the heels of another three consecutive defeats – 1981, 1987 and 1992 – separated only by Alfred Sant’s brief legislature. It is necessary to take in that full picture when considering the extent of the mess the party is in right now.

The strange thing is that one is left with the distinct impression that the party’s movers and shakers are unaware of this, and imagine that once a new leader is installed, things can go on pretty much as they were. I listen to what they say and read what they write, and the common thread is that the 8 March result was so close that the Labour Party didn’t lose. No. It almost won.

It is a crucial distinction. The ‘almost won’ mindset imagines that no fundamental change is required to secure the seat of government in 2013. This is dangerous thinking. Those big Labour cheeses should be waking up every day to chant the mantra “we lost” until the truth sinks in. Only then will there truly be the drive for change. As things stand, there barely seems to be the will to understand what went wrong, though the answers are staring them in the face and are obvious even to me. For the Nationalist Party, on the other hand, the drive to change comes from repeating the phrase “we almost lost” and not “we won”.

I don’t belong to the ranks of those who are astonished at the victory, who are amazed that it could be done and that it was done. Rather the opposite – I am shocked that such a rubbish party, with such ridiculous and risky policies, with such dreadful politicians and so disorganised, and above all, led by a serial loser who disparaged democracy and who even claimed to have won the referendum on Europe, almost got into government. It’s disgraceful. It says so much about Malta that I would prefer not to hear.

I know that around 47 per cent of the population will vote for the Labour Party even if it is swimming in a slew of ineptitude, violence and corruption. They will vote for the party if it is led by a one-eyed talking monkey wearing a suit. But this really was too much. When I heard that the majority was just 1,500, my reaction was of disbelief, disillusionment and utter cynicism that, despite the changes of the last 21 years, roughly half the Maltese population continues to think as it did before those changes had taken place. Malta has opened up, but our minds are still closed. People who acknowledged that Gonzi would make a far better prime minister than Sant still went ahead and voted to make Sant prime minister, out of some absurd tribal loyalty.

Now we sit and watch the Labour leadership soap opera and wonder where it will take us. There is just one contender who can become leader, and there is just one contender who can lift the party out of the trough of hapless misery in which it now wallows. The dilemma the party faces is that they are not the same person. Joseph Muscat will become leader, and George Abela will, for the second time, become the boat that Labour missed. It is George Abela, and not Joseph Muscat, who appeals to those who haven’t voted Labour recently or who have never voted Labour. It is George Abela who can help rein them in by removing the fright factor from the Labour Party. But that’s not going to happen.

Joseph Muscat is already disturbing floaters and people like me, and that’s just after a couple of weeks of his leadership campaign. He does not disturb us because we think he will be a good party leader who will “steal” the election from “our” party. Oh no. He is disturbing in the same way that Alfred Sant, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Dom Mintoff were disturbing, but for different reasons. We know that there’s something wrong there, but we just can’t put our finger on it yet. The other contenders are not disturbing in this way; they are simply hopeless and inept. They are not driven in that frightening way that convinces one they have some personal project in mind and are going to claw their way to the top to implement it at whatever cost to the country. They just come across as chancers who are trying their luck but who have no real hope of getting anywhere.

Muscat seems to think that if Sant swung it, then he can too. Oh, how wrong he is. When Sant came along in 1992, lots of moderates and floaters and pale-blue Nationalists had never noticed him before. They didn’t know his history in the party. They were so relieved to see a Labour leader who seemed smart and who wore a suit and came across as normal that all he needed to do was promise to get rid of VAT and he was on to a winner. But Sant wrote his own political death warrant, and no Labour leader in the same mould is going to be trusted again within this time-span of living memory. The factor working most strongly against Muscat is that he is cloned on Sant. He reminds us of him, and we don’t like that.

This sentiment is going to pick up force as Muscat’s campaign goes on a roll and we begin to see more of him and hear more of what he has to say. His two most recent and prominent appearances on television, on TVM’s Bondiplus and Dissett, were nerve-wracking. He gave an off-putting account of himself, but at the same time, it was clear that he is precisely the sort to impress unsophisticated party delegates. The attributes we class as repellent they would probably see as desirable.

Now Muscat has announced that he will be holding public meetings, and also gathering delegates together. I have heard through the political grapevine that he has used the system which pays for MEPs to organise familiarisation trips to Brussels for associates from their home countries, to host Labour Party delegates and show them around there. What do they call it? Oh, yes – the power of incumbency.

He has just given a press conference in which he “outlined his vision for the party”. Like his predecessors, he is taken up with making the mistake of differentiating between the party and the country. The Nationalist Party’s success is rooted in the fact that its visions inevitably encompass the entire country, and not just the party. Political parties are about organisation. They do not need an internal vision to work properly and efficiently. Any vision that a party builds must be a vision for the country, one that draws in the country and gets the country to vote for it.

Yet there was Muscat, telling reporters that the Labour Party’s structures need to be updated, and that the party needs to be more responsive to current needs (tell us something we don’t know). The party needs to be more “open and inclusive” he said, bringing together the moderate and progressive people of Malta. But to do that, he must first work out why the moderates and the progressives have beaten a path to the doors of the Nationalist Party in droves over the last couple of decades. Labour is now a very curious political creature: a right-wing, ultra-conservative and xenophobic animal that doesn’t understand business, mistrusts the making of money, and is beset by paranoia and class hatred.

I was waiting for it, and there I found it, in a newspaper report of his press conference: “Dr Muscat said he was proposing the creation of public fora and think tanks which would review and propose party policy.” Oh dear god in heaven. I wondered when those tink-tanks were going to appear. They are so typically pseudo-intellectual-outdated-Labour, and it doesn’t take much to work out where the idea came from if you know who’s helping run Muscat’s campaign. The idea that policies are developed by intellectuals in think tanks is about as appealingly fresh and modern as a live reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But that’s what happens when your advisers are stuck in their heyday, which coincided with the first appearance of flares and platform shoes. In the contemporary world, policies are developed by people who know about life, and more importantly, who have experience of what they are talking about. Alfred Sant inhabited a fictionalised world in which theory, divorced from reality, shaped his “narrative”. I hope this isn’t going to become a habit with Labour.

Joseph Muscat does seem to realise that new policies “in accordance with European norms” are called for, but how he is going to drag the party across the political spectrum from a strange variant of right-wing conservatism to something more liberal is quite beyond me. His great plans for reforming the Labour Party include a call centre. Yes, really – would you credit it? People call a party number and complain or suggest something. This is so unbelievably crass that I just want to flop down and weep in despair. Meanwhile, a bank of telephone operators sits there and takes complaints and suggestions about the party (“Silvio Parnis should wear less gel.”). This won’t achieve anything and it will run up even greater debts for the financially crippled party.

He also places too much faith in the Internet, and is one of the several Labour exponents who imagine that the Labour Party was damaged in this last election by its failure to be present in cyberspace. Ah, but what came first, the chicken or the egg? There were lots of pro-Nationalist views on the Internet during the election campaign because the kind of people who are comfortable on the Internet tend to be the kind of people who vote Nationalist, and not because the Nationalist Party placed them there. There was nothing to stop Labour supporters posting comments on blogs and on-line newspapers, but few of them did so. It’s not a presence on the Internet that the Labour Party needs, but more supporters who belong to the Internet generation. That it doesn’t have them is entirely its own fault.

Muscat also plans to review the party media. This inevitably means the production of a newspaper in the kind of English that those who prefer to read English never write or speak, as with the Labour Party’s ridiculous news website, Maltastar.com, which seems to exist solely to get a thrill out of publishing semi-pornographic stories and images.

I can see the picture forming before my eyes already: a party reform project that will get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of newspapers, Internet, call-centres, think-tanks and “openness”, while the Nationalist Party puts its nose to the grindstone and sees to the business of winning the next election.