You have to hand it to Labour. The party really knows how to keep the country in stitches. The election of the twin jokers in the pack of deputy leadership candidates has been met with great hilarity. Even Labour MPs are laughing, though in despair.

The real surprise is that nearly half the population doesn’t get the joke and heads right out to vote for this ship of fools every five years in the hope that things will get better within the party. Five decades later, they’re still looking for reasons to give Labour a chance. Clearly, the relationship between the Labour Party and its electors constitutes a form of marriage without divorce. I wonder whether they even take the trouble to ask themselves why Labour will have won just three general elections in more than half a century by the time we get to the next round in 2013.

Yes, that’s right: three elections in half a century since the start of the 1960s: 1971, 1976 and 1996. Because we’re talking in terms of popular support, and not seats in parliament, 1981 counts as another loss. And the 1996 win has to be framed in the context of just how many thousands of electors rushed to the polls to undo their decision only 22 months after making it. They gave Labour a chance and boy, did they regret it.

No wonder people are so reluctant to say they vote Labour, in surveys or in conversation. They know it’s embarrassing, so when they do speak up, it’s with that air of defiance, like a teenage announcing he’s gay at a family lunch with all the grandparents present and correct. Someone sticks up for Labour and everyone else raises an eyebrow and thinks of a new subject to take the conversation in a different direction as rapidly as possible. To say you vote Labour in polite company nowadays is like announcing that you have genital warts. Others change the subject to avoid the possibility of unpleasantness and too much information.

Whenever an otherwise sensible person is brave enough to claim that he or she votes Labour – anywhere other than on the comments-board of a blog or newspaper forum, that is – I immediately assume that this person’s views have been shaped by the family, in which case they might just perhaps be excused for failing to think more rationally later on in life. If the person doesn’t come from a Labour family, then I wonder what caused the shoulder-chips to grow. It has been my observation that when somebody who is fairly intelligent, from a non-Labour background and without working-class roots suddenly embraces the Labour Party in its incarnation of the past 50-odd years, something has gone wrong in that person’s life.

Deciding to support the risible Labour Party becomes an act of defiance against the gods and society, a reverse salute at life itself, and is the fruit of bitterness and disappointment, perhaps even of anger and envy. Angry teenagers dress like Goths and smash telephone booths. Angry grown-ups vote for Labour and the three stooges.

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Despite the word going round that the party machine promoted Chris Cardona and Gavin Gulia, others who share my political sympathies were pretty confident that former policeman Anglu Farrugia and Super One’s Otello Toni Abela would be elected. At a meeting on Thursday afternoon, before the first electoral round, somebody brought this up, and my reaction was that Labour delegates may have hopeless taste and no political nous, but they’re not actually certifiably insane. Besides, wasn’t the party machine that pushed Joseph Muscat now supposed to be pushing Cardona and Gulia? It turns out I was wrong and my colleague was right.

When the result of the first round was made public at about midnight, L-Ispettur and Otello had so many more votes than the runners-up that the result of the Friday run-off was a foregone conclusion. My initial thoughts were that if they were so clearly the favourites of the party delegates, and by such a wide margin, then they and not Cardona and Gulia must have been the ones pushed by the Muscat machine. Perhaps Muscat felt more able to manipulate a couple of jokers like L-Ispettur and Otello. But I was left with some nagging doubts.

Why would somebody who is trying so hard to come across as a smooth operator allow his lilo to be punctured by two deputy leaders that make the line-up look like the three stooges, when he could have had the more marketable and slicker outfit of Cardona and Gulia? Cardona and Gulia match Muscat. Abela and Farrugia match each other yet highlight Muscat’s posturing through contrast. It is the very recipe used by trios who perform comedy acts, but perhaps they’re not aware of it.

When I had thought about the matter some more, I realised that my initial analysis was completely wrong. There is no way that Muscat would have wanted Otello and L-Ispettur, and not just because they capsize his self-inflated image by behaving like an even more downmarket version of the Two Ronnies. An abiding image of the last electoral campaign is Toni Abela in some show that superseded Otello, wearing a pair of pilot’s gloves and doing a Godzilla impression around the Super One studio, muttering “par idejn sodi”, while the camera followed him around for the edification of the masses. Abela and Farrugia are going to be impossible to work with – the CEO’s worst nightmare of two directors voted in to represent the interests of family shareholders, who hijack and sabotage every meeting of the board by strenuously objecting to things they know nothing about, and making ludicrous suggestions while everyone else groans inwardly. Oh, and who then pounce on the tea and biscuits when they’re brought in.

Joseph Muscat must have wanted Cardona and Gulia, and L-Ispettur and Otello must have been the worst-case scenario for him. Now that worst-case scenario has materialised.

The party machine that pushed Muscat so successfully stopped working efficiently after scoring that first goal, or else it met with great resistance. It’s important to remember that in the first electoral round – which is where the true loyalties of the delegates are to be identified – Muscat scored just under 50 per cent of the vote, and this despite the mammoth support he received through the power of incumbency of his backers. The delegates may have felt they had to vote as the incumbent powers wished them to vote, when it came to the party leader. But then when it came to voting for the deputy leaders, they revelled in the freedom to vote as their instincts told them to vote, and they homed in on the two most vulgar and rough-edged candidates in the line-up, and the ones most prone to making astonishing judgements (“The Nationalist Party won because it set up a fund to buy the votes of Labour drug addicts through agents.”). Seen in this light, the election of Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela is beginning to look like a backlash against the perceived imposition of Joseph Muscat.

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Anglu Farrugia has announced that he has full faith in Joseph Muscat and wishes to help him cause an internal earthquake in the Labour Party, and another down the road in the Nationalist Party. That shouldn’t be a problem. All he has to do is fall on both buildings from a great height, preferably while sitting on an elephant.

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