Our political system is modelled to a large extent on the British one, but we have failed to see how the British have evolved and how we too have evolved away from the British model.

Our Parliament Chamber (until the new one) is very similar to the House of Commons with two sides facing each other (although we do not have the real proximity they have in London).

But then the British Parliament is the fruit of the first past the post system, which should make for stability. I use the word ‘should’ guardedly because the British have had experience of hung parliaments and the system has allowed the presence of three parties in the House.

Even so, this time, under Cameron, the British have had to adapt themselves to a coalition government and, though with regular hiccups and tussles, no one would have bet on its having survived so far.

In our case, we are failing to understand how fragile and shaky our parliamentary system has become. This is the second time since 1996 that a wafer-thin majority has turned into a quagmire that has made life hell for the executive.

Our parliamentary system is based on our electoral proportional representation, which, together with our 1987 and later constitutional amendments, ensure that the party with the majority of votes gets the majority of seats in a two-party chamber. Even so, as we all know, this has not ensured stability as the presence of at least three rebels on the government’s backbench has rendered the government unstable for the past year or so.

Right now, all the signs are there that the government hopes to be allowed to end its work by spring next year, as can be seen from the queue of Bills awaiting discussion after 1 October – IVF, cohabitation, the European treaty, now the grant of the Medical School building for a religious primary school etc, plus who knows what else pushes all talk of a swift end to this legislature on to the backburner.

Then, too, the fact itself that the new Parliament building and the rest of the Renzo Piano project are due to be finished by Q1 2013 indicate the government really hopes this would be the time to go to the country.

But to succeed in imposing this unlikely timetable on a country already sick of partisan squabbles means far more than the sleight of hand we have come to associate with Lawrence Gonzi. It essentially means keeping the three rebels on the backbenches, in one way or another, tame and pliable till the very end. The fact the government has come through all those dark clouds of the past months when we wondered time and again if there would be a government by the end of the day, and time and again the government somehow survived, does not mean this can go on for ever. It is also true that by defeating the government, the eventual rebel, who has been banned from standing with the party in the next election, would be signing his political death warrant.

So we are in a sort of limbo at present – on the one hand the government would like to continue till next spring; on the other hand it is afraid it will not last that long – hence the preparations for the election this autumn.

On either side, the hopes are of a straight victory at the polls – on the Labour side even more because all indications are PL will win – and that the eventual victory will remove any instability and give the country a stable government for the entire legislature.

This, I argue, is a forlorn hope, although I stand to be corrected by the votes themselves. The Maltese are a complex lot and their responses to the questions asked by the pollsters in pre-election times can be dangerously misleading and open to interpretation, as I myself found out when I heard people replying to a phone pollster in the past days. I wondered how the nuanced and argued replies given to the pollster were being marked at the other end. Anyway, the most significant (as always) factor in the recent poll was the increase and the consistence of those who did not give an answer or who said they would not vote.

What I am saying will be borne out by events post election, or maybe not. I say the lost opportunity in this legislature has been the sheer inability of Dr Gonzi to live with people he did not directly control. In other words, compared to David Cameron, Dr Gonzi’s inability to come to terms with a coalition. As it is, we are all paying for this flaw, with the current instability and with the coming election being once again an eyeball-to-eyeball one with all the devils of the past rearing their heads again, as we saw in recent weeks.

This time, indeed, we are in a worse state for the really bad devils have been let out of the box with the emergence of blogs and Facebook and comment spaces, although chi di blogs ferisce, di blogs morisce.

It is an essential part of the spin generated by the government machine that the rebels are three and only three and that they must have something in their bodies or their minds to act like this.

They are not just three but the rest keep their heads down and vote along party lines. What is very surprising is that people who have worked at close quarters and in very important roles quite suddenly have come to be quite open (in closed conversations) about how they were not allowed to do their bit, how decisions were taken out of their hands, how even ministers were left out of the loop and how everything is decided at the very top.

This, as readers will by now understand, is what Franco Debono and JPO have been saying, but then they, Dr Debono especially, have injected so much personal pique and personality issues, so much misinterpretation of the situation and so much personal antipathies that in the end they have become their own worst enemies. They have undermined their very exact descriptions of the state of affairs.

Nor do I go along with what they say about ‘the clique at Castille’ but yes, in the Gonzi administration the real decisions are taken at the very top. Even ministers are sidelined and relegated to an onlooker status or else left to their own devices until they come a cropper when decisions are taken away from their hands and everything is decided at Castille.

The story how Mater Dei was finally completed and opened is symptomatic, how Louis Deguara was first entrusted with the job, then sidelined, then John Dalli. Now we have Joe Cassar in the hot seat.

No doubt, Dr Gonzi will gnash his teeth when he reads this (if he reads it at all) considering the many times he has had to pick up the tabs for things done by his subalterns.

Enter David Cameron. Even he had to deal with less than competent ministers, so last week he carried out his reshuffle. Some were disappointed, others elated. But there was no Franco Debono nor a JPO – for the simple reason that by deliberately choosing a coalition rather than govern alone, David Cameron strengthened his hand against any would-be mavericks. (He has Boris Johnson – a maverick writ large – on his back, as it is).

I think that Lawrence Gonzi rather liked being in sole command, with no one to stand up to him, nobody to contradict him, so he could get on with the job. But a lot of mistakes were committed along the line, if not by him by his subordinates, (though for the most glaring, the €500 a week increase, he has had to shoulder full responsibility, even though he had nothing to do with it) and now there is no one else to shoulder responsibility except the man who stands at the top all alone.

This does not mean that nothing good was done. On the contrary, a lot was done, a real lot. Last week’s NSO announcement that we are out of the recession, even if these findings still have to be confirmed or adjusted by later NSO appraisals and, of course, a Eurostat careful analysis, is a case in point.

Nor does this mean that Joe Muscat and his merry band will be any better. On the contrary, I rather feel they will not be.

Over the past months, to my great surprise, I found myself repeatedly becoming quite negative on the Gonzi legacy, such as after the Arriva debacle, when I urged him to consider whether his time was up. At other times, I urged him to a grand reconciliation with the PN grass roots, many of whom had become disenchanted.

This has not been done and, as I see it, we will have more signs of an inept party coming up with old Conservative billboards instead of appealing to today’s voters. People around me, diehard PN supporters, are still very much disenchanted and cross. Whether the last days of the election campaign will get them off the wall they are sitting on and out in support is still rather far-fetched. Hopefully, that will not require tempers to become so red-hot as they were in the past weeks following Dom Mintoff’s death.

Dr Gonzi must come to terms with his coalition partner – the disenchanted PN grassroots. Not Franco Debono, nor JPO, with all their colourful vivaciousness and ingenuity, should be the real focus for the man at the top.

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