The Labour Party spends three years telling us that people can afford the gravy but not the meat, and then has the brass neck to devote almost the whole of Republic Day to a fundraising ‘spettaklu’ on Super One television, trying to get the money to pay its own utilities bills from the supporters who, it tells us, can’t afford to pay theirs.

It even requested donations of €50 from people who, we are told, won’t be buying Christmas presents this year or heating their homes, but the donations came in all the same because donors got the chance to win an iPad, no less. Will they be able to afford the electricity to charge it up, or the petrol to go and collect it?

If they go by bus, will they have to wait on the bus-stop for an hour and then take another 90 minutes to get to Mile End to pick up their prize?

In the end, the Labour Party collected €336,635, a significant improvement over the €210,511 it garnered in the same Christmas fundraiser two years ago, when the party was far more popular but the electioneering spirit had not yet hit. Or maybe it’s just that people were eating each other in hunger back then and now they’re better off and can spare a few cents for Jason Micallef’s Super One salary.

And where was the Super One chairman during the fundraiser, anyway? He was nowhere to be seen, unless he put in a brief appearance at the start and I missed it. Had he given us a twirl in a tulle tutu and some peacock feathers, I’d gladly have dialled the number for €50 and donated my iPad prize back to the Super One salaries fund. The thought of Charlon Gouder having to beg on a street corner for money to get him through his law course is just unbearable, poor thing.

I’m not alone in finding these shows seriously addictive, and strangely enough (or perhaps not), it’s the Labour Party fundraiser that kept me glued, eyes on stalks, to the screen. Over on Net, Louise Tedesco valiantly held the fort for grace and elegance amid the onslaught of sometimes fearsome Catholic-Institute-style showmanship, but the people I know seemed to be stuck to Super One. The text messages flew back and forth: “Look at that.” “What’s Michelle doing? Why is she dressed as an air hostess? Why does Joseph still have his coat on?” “What’s Elena’s daughter doing running around bouncing on Anġlu Farrugia’s lap at 10 o’clock at night?” And then the best one of all: “I like Super One’s show best because it’s interactive like a horror film or really bad comedy show. I spend half the time with my hands over my eyes or my head in a cushion, going ‘Oh my God.’”

I don’t know what went wrong towards the end, but something certainly did because the big cheeses on screen – Michelle, Joseph, Anġlu, Ray the compere – looked increasingly disconcerted and distracted, and it wasn’t just tiredness or the awfulness of being there and forced to listen for the hundredth time to Renato and Mary Spiteri.

The show was meant to go on until midnight, like the Enemy Production over at Net, but the whole thing was drawn abruptly to a close just after 11 o’clock. Shortly before that, Joseph Muscat had been told the sum collected – it was €304,200 at that point – and his reaction was muted and very odd. You’d think that he would be overjoyed at having wrested 300 big ones out of people who were watching their televisions in the dark, but no.

So I flicked to Net and found the reason: the enemy had by then collected something like €434,000. By the time they shut up shop at midnight, the figure stood at €467,880.

My first inclination was to put the strange 11 o’clock behaviour on Super One down to peevishness and childish pique. Instead of being really happy with the enormous amount they had collected, they were cheesed off because people had tucked more euros into the enemy’s thong. What a daft reaction, I thought to myself: if somebody trots along and gives me €300,000 to help me pay my bills, I’m going to be thrilled and not down in the mouth because somebody else got €400,000 to help pay theirs.

But then I realised that it’s bigger than that, that the confounded, confused and distracted behaviour I had noticed on screen were the signs of a very real perplexity. It is not the first time that the Labour Party has fallen victim to its own lies, repeating them so often that it ends up believing them itself, and this throws its planning and strategy right off course.

In the script Labour would have written in its own mind for last Tuesday, it was flooded with many hundreds of thousands of euros from people of all walks of life who want to help in the heroic struggle to overthrow and depose the Evil Tyrant gOnZipN and crown Young Joseph instead, installing him in the palace of government with his lovely young wife and his two beautiful twins (who were wheeled out late at night, unbelievably, to help pull in the funds).

Meanwhile, in the same script, over at Net, the Evil Tyrant was left to prostrate himself and beg before his televised audience, perhaps even resorting to wearing a pair of jolly antlers, in the struggle to raise maybe a hundred thousand from the last few diehards who will not desert the hopeless PN even though it has wrecked the country and they have been left to starve and freeze in the dark.

A fundraiser is not an opinion poll, but as a way of gauging popular sentiment, it is a whole lot better than sniffing the wind (though that is pretty good, too). Even to Joseph and Michelle, who have demonstrated over the last few months a remarkable capacity for detachment from reality, the results of the Super One and Net fundraisers must have been a bit of a dent in that ivory tower. It would have looked to them, as it did to me, that people are pouring money on the Nationalist Party because they are increasingly afraid of Joseph, Michelle and Anġlu getting hold of the country and calling it their own.

It was a huge mistake to parade Anġlu Farrugia on Super One to raise money for Labour at the same time that Net was raising money for the Nationalist Party. People switch between stations, and the sight of Tuks Farrugia on Super One would have sent many people I know straight back to Net to get the number for the €50 donation, possibly even pressing it several times in a row until they had the phone wrested from them by another family member.