Joseph Muscat, taking his cue from his new/old man Edward Scicluna, who famously said in a newspaper interview that he’s with Labour because he has a natural tendency to side with the underdog, has been feeding this term into the mix himself over the last few weeks. Aside from the fact that sympathy for the underdog does not explain Scicluna’s support for the Labour Party during the Golden Years, when it was most definitely Top Dog and no mistake about it, Muscat’s use of this word is undermined by current events and opinion polls.

The polls all put him in a clear lead over Lawrence Gonzi and put his party on track to win the general election, whether it is held imminently or on schedule. There is nothing ‘underdog’ (or more appropriately, underpoodle) about this. The emerging underdog in this scenario is, strangely enough, the Prime Minister. Despite being the boss man on paper, he is so clearly under siege by his tantrum-inclined backbenchers, so beset by obstacles put in his path by one particular backbencher who’s eaten up by rage, jealousy and frustrated ambition, so embattled by the problems of real life in the running of a country in an economic crisis, so patient with the early hustings charades of his opposite number, that people have ended up rooting for him who were not rooting for him before.

There is a reason why Joseph Muscat would like us to believe that Labour is the electoral underdog. When certain people think there is a real risk that Labour will lead the country, they are more inclined to vote Nationalist even if the Nationalists have been getting on their nerves and they have spent the last few months saying they are not going to vote or vote Labour/AD. When these same people are confident that they will get a Nationalist government no matter what they do or don’t do, they are more likely to vote Labour to minimise the PN majority and ‘teach them a lesson’ (how tedious, really, and infantile to gamble in this manner with one’s future and that of the country) or not to vote at all. This is one of the reasons for the rather spectacular Labour victory in 1996 – you know, the very one the Underpoodle wants us to forget about so that he can stick to his new theme of Labour not having won the majority of votes since 1976. He said that on the record, to camera, conveniently overlooking Alfred Sant’s achievement and premiership, and not a single reporter took him to task for doing so, or even bothered to ask him why he did it. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue because he was working to a script.

Back in 1996, the run-up to the general election was loud with the sound of Nationalist Party politicians and activists saying that they were headed for the biggest electoral victory ever, and talked of a 20,000 vote majority. Television cameras showed us, in excruciating and triumphal detail, scenes of Eddie Fenech Adami riding on an open car through what had to be the most enormous mass meeting ever in the history of the Nationalist Party. Confident that he would be returned to power, perverse thinkers in their thousands thought it would be a great idea to cut him and his party down to size and, thinking to discipline the PN by slimming the majority, voted Labour. There were, of course, other significant reasons for the Labour majority, not least Sant’s irresponsible promises, which he couldn’t and didn’t keep, about the removal of value added tax. But a leading cause was the quirky reasoning of people who want, for a variety of reasons but mainly to cut the Nationalists down to size, to vote Labour and still get a Nationalist government.

The Underpoodle, having studied the situation with an intimacy he failed to devote to EU membership or the tactics of Franco Debono, has decided that between now and the general election, whenever it happens, he is going to play on our emotions by playing the part of the little, disadvantaged man who is trying to come in from the cold. It goes without saying, for we have become accustomed to his poor strategic thinking now, that the way he is going about this is all wrong. An underdog does not have his people talk of him as ‘practically the prime minister’ or take tours of projects in prime ministerial mode. And an underdog certainly does not speak to the press repeatedly in a stage-managed situation complete with teleprompters, podium, snazzy backdrop and a line-up of three flags. An Underpoodle might, but that’s different.

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