The PN’s billboard campaign could not have had a worse start. Not only was their launch derivative, plagiarised and unimaginative but things were made even worse by Minister Tonio Fenech when he told the press that his party would be explaining its policies through its billboards

How right he was. The billboard showed very clearly that in spite of the clarity and sharpness they were meant to convey, the only message they managed to get across was that not only have they gone stale and well past their sell-by date in government, but also that as a party the best they can come up with are recycled and repackaged old ideas. So much so that the usual suspects were in a frenzy about this dismal flop.

While GonziPN has confirmed the obvious in that it will be basing itself on the fear factor since it has every reason to avoid commenting on their dysfunctional current state of affairs and lack of vision for the future, it has also unwittingly managed to highlight the fact that while the PL is the party that inspires hope in addressing the future, it is inclined to grow even more inward looking and retrospective.

Regardless of their members’ varying ages, the party has become a spent force – bereft of the creative spark that might have triggered them under their previous leader.

Whenever I visit disillusioned Nationalist voters – particularly in Nationalist stronghold areas – the general feeling is that they are in search of what went wrong within the party they had cherished so much in the past.

Was it its recent track record? The leader and Prime Minister himself? The policies? The implementation process? Or rather a wrong sense of priorities; which other independent newspapers have had no hesitation in dismissing as an unendless series of untimely and unnecessary expenses.

No wonder people I meet and editorials that I read tend to argue that there is something that is not exactly clicking.

Particularly lumped as we have been with the building of a Parliament house that we do not actually need, even more so given the economic circumstances and the difficulty to contain and bring down our deficit.

At day’s end these are not mistakes of a bent ideological orientation. But rather a series of wrong priorities that tend to defy the most basic of elements of common sense.

Although I am usually highly critical of Paul Borg Olivier’s dismal performance as PN General Secretary I think that he fared best during the recent media conference launching their billboards campaign.

Since he wisely chose to (or was asked to) stay away from the media conference itself.

This way he was spared from ending up with more egg on his face.

No wonder that dissident MPs within GonziPN’s uncomfortable cohabitation (the word seems to fit more than coalition) have been pleading with their own party officials to stop making a mockery of their own party.

Whoever came up with the idea of reviving the Thatcherite spirit of the late 70s to try and revive the PN’s flagging spirits needs to be (politically) whipped hard. Especially if he or she happens to have been actually paid by GonziPN to come up with such an idea. As I understand was the case with certain hacks who were responsible for the English newspaper ads of the 2008 election campaign.

If the PN had no qualms about drawing on a hoary old trick of three decades ago, I will not be surprised if they will also try to plagiarise another campaign slogan: The New Labour, New Danger advert in which the Tories had tried to play on the fear factor, faced as they were by the prospect of a young, untried and untested, but charismatic and energetic new Labour leader by the name of Tony Blair.

On that occasion they had drawn up an effective demon eyes ad that if my memory serves me well has ranked as highly as Eva Herzigova’s bosom in terms of campaign strategy and effectiveness.

And yet Labour went on to win three elections in a row in spite of it all.

That particular ad had initially been effective because it had brilliantly played on public doubts about Mr Blair’s reliability while picking up on a nagging doubt whether he was sincere or not.

As in the case of the recent PN billboard, the Tony Blair demon eyes billboard might have created a controversy but at day’s end it was dismissed by campaign experts as having a persuasiveness quotient of zero, since it might have cheered the party faithful and a few diehards, but according to them “it was absolutely hopeless, a desperately sad decision”.

The PN have lost so much credibility in recent months that no one can take their boastful claims that seriously. Including the empty and hollow boast that they created some 20,000 jobs.

That they are plagiarists down at heart was confirmed during the last election campaign when they literally cloned Sarkozy’s Ensemble Tout deviant possible to come up with the famous and by now infamous Iva, Flimkien kollox possibbli.

What is irking GonziPN most is that Joseph Muscat is showing great connectivity with the electorate without resorting to the cheap populism that they accuse him of.

He keeps his arguments simple but effective and easy to convey and comprehend.

There is none of the holier-than-thou approach or boastfulness that has characterised the GonziPN campaign after a few days or weeks of phony public repentance.

The biggest drawback for GonziPN is that people are beginning to listen to Labour again. In fact they have been doing it for months on end.

The worst that can happen to a political party is that people might be inclined to switch off before one even attempts to try and get his message across.

The growing conviction that the PL will offer a different style of government and governing is proving to be unsettling for GonziPN since more of the same is everyone’s greatest fear.

While the PN has been shrinking as a political party, in shaping up as a political movement, the PL has grown into a positive project that many are eager to join.

The election is still up for grabs, but what could prove to be GonziPN’s achilles heel will not be the quality (or lack of it) of their billboards. But that they seem to be evidently incapable and not just unsure of reading the people’s minds.

To get emails from the UK from non-PL voters about the ‘intellectual poverty’ of GonziPN’s campaigning style is no mean feat.

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Leo Brincat is the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Sustainable Development & Climate Change