‘Hell hath no fury …’ like the Nationalist Party in defeat.

This is addressed to the many toyboys, window mannequins and the like that seem to flit around the PN top levels nowadays.

They are mostly too young to remember, for in 1996 there was far too little time for shock and reaction to set in before Lino Spiteri resigned in March 1997 and showed up the cracks that were developing in Alfred Sant’s government.

But in 1971 it was something different, another dimension of reaction.

Ask Henry Frendo who was summarily kicked out from his post as editor of the church’s own daily paper when the College of Parish Priests decided he had gone too far when he serialised his studies on Manwel Dimech.

And so, if PN loses the election, there will be a tremendous reaction against those who in the eyes of the PN grassroots will be held responsible for the defeat.

Contrary perhaps to what goes on in the Labour Party where a defeat is blamed on the man at the top, the PN grassroots do not, unlike Franco Debono, blame Lawrence Gonzi. Of course, it is understood that a defeated Lawrence Gonzi will stand down, though Eddie Fenech Adami, (despite my urging him to do so) did not and led Malta to the EU and to 12 more years of PN rule.

Nor will it be pinned on the ministers of Dr Gonzi’s Cabinet. This is another difference between PN and PL. Whatever human failings the PN ministers may have, and they have several, they will become the party’s old warhorses but not end their lives in ignominy.

No, the reaction will target the many young people in the party’s structures, its media and in the manifold government communication officers’ network. And while the reaction will be muted with regards to ministers and the like, it will be implacable in their regard. Nor can they be guaranteed to be found alternative employment.

They are not prepared for this, so they might as well start thinking about losing the present privileges (meaning hard work too, as they see it), their access to government offices, and their facile system of solving everything through a well-placed phone call or two.

They will be blamed for the defeat and, while at present they may not even perceive this, when it comes it will be quite a shock for them.

They may feel this is all a put-up game or that I am being unfair to target them, but when the chips fall down, I will not be alone in the blame-game.

The party is in shambles, such as it has never been over the past years. It has become a narrower and closer ring of people living in self-admiration and almost equal superficiality and incompetence.

Working in the media as I am, I have yet to meet such an incompetent and hard-headed group of people as the communications officials of the present government. Some, even now at the tail-end of the legislature, I still do not know, have never taken any steps to make themselves known to me, and to find out what comments I might have about their policies. In many cases, I have still to be given an overview of their policies and preoccupations. I said many years ago, that when I was invited to France at the beginning of the French Presidency, I was given a short introduction about the salient points of French policy such as I was never given in Malta. When I was invited to Berlin last March there too I was given a holistic overview of German policy on the financial crisis such as I was never given here in my own country.

People outside the media may not understand how shallow and unprofessional the set-up here is. In other countries, there is a strong central government communications office that is the government’s official voice on everything. Here, every minister has his own communications team which many a time act as the flunkeys, the minders, those who hold the coat, adjust the mike, etc.

Coordination is very loose: each minister or his team sends press releases to DOI and they are quickly disseminated without any previous coordination at OPM level. When a minister (such as Austin Gatt) gets angry and lets fly an angry statement, the government is lumped with that and its inevitable consequences.

Many times, even with a very compliant and unquestioning media, big stories are left to fall by the wayside. Many times I have been to events that warranted interesting coverage by the media but what came out in the media were the minister’s not always coherent speech, written by speechwriters who many times have no idea what the event is about.

The communications officers are all focused on their minister’s speech and very little focus is on the context.

This goes all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office. Dr Gonzi began his terms with a monthly press conference, then, when the questions began to reflect the particular issues the media houses were about, and the coverage of the press conference turned around to be about Dr Gonzi’s replies to that question was, the press conferences were quietly dropped.

Other countries have a far different situation. First of all, there is nothing of this continual running about by ministers foolishly trying to appear twice or three times on TVM news every day. Many times, prime ministers hold a regular press conference (Angela Merkel had her summer press conference last week). Government communication is not the rather easy job of sending copies of every speech a minister does. Government communication reacts to news as it happens, not days later. Here, government loses the momentum of the story. By the time the government gets around to state its version, the story has been hijacked by the anti-government critics and it then sticks. Many times, the government reaction comes in far too late to be included. And newspapers get away with running the critical side of a story but not the government’s version.

Need any more elucidations?

The party’s media is in a pitiful state. Can a party in government accept that its media is third or fourth in popularity without trying to improve its standing? Can the party which claims it knows best what is good for the private sector then have the most ramshackle of outfits? It was PN which liberalised the airwaves in the early 1990s and this situation of the two parties taking the second and third place in popularity has stifled the entire liberalisation effort and turned the media into the charade it is now, that one TV news states everything is all OK and the other stating nothing is OK. And Johnny Citizen in between trying to sort the truth from the spin.

When the chips fall down, the PN grassroots will want to get answers from the people today in the higher levels of the party. Not getting any answers, and a defeat is the answer that defeats them all, the finger of blame will be pointed directly at these people.

Whatever the ultimate result, the election process, as I see it, is yet another shambles from the people who have created shambles all through these years and who should have been turfed out long ago.

Let’s start with the top. One element of the present situation, I think, is the personality of the party leader. Considering the buffeting there has been these last years, Dr Gonzi is, at best, a controversial figure. Many in the party idolise him, but many too disagree with him (especially that fringe the party so needs for success). Does it make sense, I ask, to have each and every party activity be one in which the sole speaker is the PM? Don’t the rest of the team have anything to say or are they fulfilling their role just by filling seats and clapping like mad?

You speak to party candidates and they all tell you about the hard job of door-to-door canvassing. Now I don’t know about you guys, but no candidate has been round so far. Not this year, nor in previous years. All we get are coloured pamphlets we promptly bin.

As far as I can see, what door-to-door forays are done, get done on the street by street, ‘our people’ vs ‘their people’ basis. Politicians could take a leaf out of other institutions, notably the church at blessing time: many people multitask, many people are not at home at convenient times, many people have very full lives. If a politician ‘does’ a street just because his minders get him to visit people who will anyway vote for him, he has wasted his and people’s time.

Richard McGregor wrote this on last Saturday’s FT ‘Inside Obama’s HQ’: “In the old days, volunteer door-knockers would have gone to campaign headquarters, where they would have been given a few pieces of paper, a list of names and addresses and a clipboard. Now, campaigns can save supporters the trouble of the trip, because the information about the address of Harris and the like is just a few taps away on their mobile phones.

“But the app provides only a tiny glimpse into the tools being used by both competing candidates and their campaigns. Through Facebook interactions, blog postings and Twitter accounts, the campaigns now know much more than the few biographical scraps of the kind displayed by the free campaign download.

“They might know whether voters have made up their minds about whom to support, what issue will sway their decision, and which of their friends are best placed to talk them around. They can then match that up with other information – how much they earn, their religion, whether they are married or divorced, how many children they have, and so on.

“Most people think, ‘Oh my God! They know everything about me – they’ve got detectives in my bushes!’” says Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist who has advised Romney in past campaigns. “They don’t. But they do know if you’re a Catholic professional who owns a house and who’s registered to vote, and doesn’t vote in school board elections but tends to vote in other elections. And if you’re married, have three kids and subscribe to a lot of magazines.”

With that information, he says, “they can start to match you up with maybe 100 sub-clusters of different types of people, based on polling, and guess – they never know for sure – what you’re more likely to be interested in. And then try to tailor some communication to you based on that.”

Barack Obama did not get where he is without a lot of hard work. Lesson 1: it is not the candidate who canvasses people as much as volunteers.

Secondly, I admit such cross-referencing of Facebook or blog posts, etc would be shocking in Malta where we seem to think we can blog for all we’re worth but still conserve our privacy.

Thirdly, Obama showed how to get as many people who did not intend to vote, as possible, to go out to the polls. Here, all we seem to do is to find out what people want from the government and to turn everything upside down to give it to them. In the EU referendum we had people resisting to vote just because the government had not fixed a lamp at the end of their alley. I heard of a family who is now threatening not to vote because while having a garage of their own they have set their eyes on another garage at the other end of town and want it by hook or by crook.

The party which won in 1987 with ‘Drittijiet, mhux pjaċiri” now risks going down because it has allowed people to turn its principle upside down.

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