For a whole 30 minutes last Wednesday, the affable Chris Said became the nation’s whipping boy.

It happened, obviously, in Parliament where for 30 minutes he had to face, all on his own, the combined onslaught of the Labour Opposition since he was standing in for the Prime Minister.

In itself the matter was serious and merited attention, though not so serious as to make it to the newspapers the next day.

Leo Brincat was asking about noxious smells in the Marsa Menqa area. The written reply that Chris Said kept reading over and over again said the situation was being monitored.

This was not enough for Mr Brincat and his colleagues, because last year the government had given the same bland assurances and the problem was still there. Last March, the former Lohombus house now used by Mepa had to be evacuated with people ending up in hospital.

It would seem, Mr Brincat added, that someone is dumping used oil in the sewers. Everyone seems to know this and many have made reached their own conclusions about the culprit but this culprit seems too entrenched to be caught in the act.

So, OK, this was not the end of the world, but still it merited a proper reply. The fact that Dr Gonzi was not in the House got Joseph Muscat’s goat that he (Dr Muscat) became quite livid about. He should learn that irony many times is far more effective than righteous anger.

Of course, what Dr Gonzi was doing is none of the country’s business. The next thing he had in his diary was opening an art exhibition at Castile at 7pm. Likewise, the previous day Dr Gonzi had spent more than two hours at Pawlu Mizzi 80th birthday celebrations.

Yet this sort of thing has been happening too often, far too often. The impression one gets is that somehow Dr Gonzi has been tempted to avoid getting into the verbal skirmishes and being waylaid the way he usually is as soon as he enters the House.

Some time ago, I had said the present administration has two Oppositions: one is the parliamentary Opposition and the other the PN parliamentary group and the wider reaches of the Nationalist Party.

In the coming week PN will be holding its General Council. Readers remember that last June, on the morrow of the dismal showing registered by PN in the MEP elections, calls were frequent that the party must convoke its assembly, the General Council. Then came Victor Scerri’s resignation but still no general council was called. Until now. The assembly is being held this coming week, almost on the last useful date it can be held before the Budget grabs the national attention, and then comes Christmas.

Whatever the reasons for Dr Gonzi being away from the House during Question Time, he will not be able to absent himself from the General Council of his party. And while across from him in the House he sees his counterpart, who has not suffered any defeat from him, at the General Council he will be surrounded by people who he had forced out of their jobs as ministers, people he did not appoint as ministers, and also the man who contested for his post and believed, until the end, that he had it made.

The past weeks have shown a resurgent and restive backbench and parliamentary group that have not been afraid of making their views known to all and sundry. The closed meetings of the group have become as open as any open meeting, if not more. Spin and counter-spin have divulged details of every nuance in such meetings.

Apart from the backbench, that the wider reaches of the party are restive if not downright rebellious is an open secret. Apart from the closed-knit group at Castile, not even at the Stamperija, people who used to be ready to do everything for the party are now openly critical and standoffish.

What will it be? Will it be the usual, if you don’t mind, hypocritical paeans of praise and boasting of past general councils, including people one knows to be otherwise critical? Or will it be an open expression of criticism that will then make One News’ day for months to come? Or will it be something so abstruse that only experts could decipher what is being said, and only after consulting a dictionary?

This being Malta, people are still very afraid of a prime minister. Reportedly, he has not been in the best of moods over the past weeks. Over summer, he has tried his best to woo the rebels in the parliamentary group, but his charm cannot work miracles on people who are deeply, but deeply, aggrieved, over what has been done.

From being an asset, Dr Gonzi is fast becoming the party’s albatross. It is becoming ever more clear he did win the election against all odds and by dint of so much hard work, but he also carried with him a whole skein of private agreements with sectional interests that are only now becoming apparent and evident. Apart from finding itself with just a one-seat majority, the party in government is now bogged down with private agreements it knew nothing about and which could also hinder proper governance.

The impression that was given till a few months ago was that people genuinely liked and admired Dr Gonzi for his upright character. They may still be doing so, but meanwhile an increasing number is wondering if he is the best man for the job. Uprightness alone won’t save the country.

All this and more is the reason why the party should have a general clarification of ideas, opinions and principles at next week’s general council. Those who are critical should not be afraid of taking the floor, even at the risk of being shown on One News for weeks to come. Similarly, those who have particular contributions to make.

It is important, on the one hand, that the party in government is allowed full freedom to work and to implement its vision and its electoral programme. But the party that fights the next election must be wider, far wider, than what remains of GonziPN. It must be a Nationalist Party that somehow comes up with a political vision for the next 10 years. If the party is to widen its appeal, it must break the grip that the Office of the Prime Minister and Castile have on the party and its appointments.

This is no call for a palace coup, but rather for a better clarification of ideas. To be in power means a whole lot of real power in one’s hands, from the power of appointments to the power of deciding things. The party and its grassroots must reclaim at least its share of such power, mainly in the area that has to do with principles, political choices and also the ability to criticize what one feels is going wrong without being made to feel one is a traitor to one’s class.

Maybe all this may sound far too much to many, as it may be. However, one must also be reminded of the alternative. The alternative is coming up around next January. It will be only around then that Dr Gonzi will be 22 months in power with a one-seat majority. The timing is almost right: the coming Budget decisions may be the trigger, just as they were in 1998.

People have been saying all along that not one or the PN rebels, not even all of them together, make one Dom Mintoff. But are we all so sure? And are we all so sure this drip-drip of leaks, spin and barely concealed quotes from people is not undermining the government as much if not more than Dom’s seven-hour speeches?

We all seem to give too much importance to the votes in the House, but less so to the votes in the 2013 election. Even if the PN administration wins any or all of the coming votes in the House, will it, on the strength of how people today perceive this administration’s track record, win their approbation through votes in 2013?

The coming Budget and the present economic situation carry many unknown factors. For all the optimist spin, we are not out of the woods so far, not by a long chalk. On the contrary, the stress has been building up in some particular sectors such as tourism and construction, and things in these and similar sectors are at breaking point.

It has always been said that Malta is “late in, late out” of a recession and in our specific case this now means that while other countries are coming out of the recession, although consumer sentiment is still reluctant to follow as people are still scared, oil prices are coming to reflect a world out of a recession, that is, are on the increase to what will most probably be their real value. That means the double whammy of still being in a recession and being clobbered by higher oil prices.

On a more general level, the government has, for far too long, been doing its own thing and getting its own way with no checks in sight, from running the country to the Renzo Piano plan. To be in politics means continually taking decisions which will impact the real lives of people. For a long, perhaps too long a time, people have been allowing Lawrence Gonzi to decide for them. Perhaps the time has come for people to re-appropriate this power and decide, or part-decide for themselves.

Don’t get me wrong: this may not necessarily end up like what happened to Alfred Sant in 1998. That was Sant and that was Labour. Conceivably, it could still be possible for the PN at large to engage in clear dissent and voice contrary opinions without engendering any lasting split in the party. The PN’s DNA is not the PL’s. Or is it?

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