It has been a campaign based on a lie, other lies, and fear mongering so far.

And it is not Joseph Muscat who is doing the lying or exuding fear.

For instance: “Finanzi fis-Sod”, the PN’s posters say, though not in huge type, as if after saying it, they want to hide it.

How can our finances be sound, with €5 billion of public debt, and nothing to make good for it? Is it any wonder that the Walter Mitty character who leads the charge sees €49 million as just a drop in the ocean – of course it is just a drop, compared to €5,000 million of debt.

Even the family silver has gone, and the money it yielded was squandered, by such as the finance minister, who hoarded his own, and hogged a lift to watch his UK football team play. No matter that the lift-giver was a government contract taker. But how else can you live high on the hog, the €600 a week earnings rise having been withdrawn.

We can’t sell our part of the Mediterranean, to raise some cash, nor can we sell our salubrious sun. But there is no mention of that. The finances are sound, we are told. But they are backed by nothing material. The only collateral are the brows of an industrious people. It is they who carry the burden. Not the PN government, which created it.

The proud author of this situation smiles into the microphone as he mouths his platitudes, and astounding, sometimes scandalously divisive, opinions, which humiliate only him and his party. Let us not attribute that to an unChristian upbringing, but rather to the desperation of a man, and his deputy, who see power slipping away from them, with the realisation that their advisers have led them up a blind alley.

“We are going for it,” he tells his supporters. And they dutifully applaud him. But even that is a half-truth. For he does not tell the supporters he could not help “going for it”. He had to. He delayed the election date as much as he could, for as long as a year, in spite of repeated indignities in parliament, where he lost his majority, and was told repeatedly by his own, that he was surrounded by, and in the grip of, a clique of evil.

His skin is thick, however. He always smiled.

But the day came when he could no longer delay “going for it”. So now he is “going for it” – time had wound down on him inexorably. He tried to make it seem that he was “going for it” willingly. But we know better, don’t we. Those, I mean, who want to know.

He boasts of his ‘achievements’.

As Walter Mitty did, who fantasised himself as a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Norman Wisdom, too, fancied himself a surgeon, in ‘A Stitch in Time’.

But he is a pilot, and a killer. He piloted his country into so much debt, that he killed what his predecessor left of whatever was sound in the economy. The predecessor has now disowned him.

He is proud of what he has ‘achieved’ in the health sector, he says. And keeps a straight face saying it.

A ‘state-of-the-art’ hospital has patients on stretchers in the corridors. The indignities are horrendous, but the sufferers suffer in silence. It takes hours to be seen in emergency, where overworked staff work wonders. And people needing life-saving medicines, which they are supposed to get for free, find them to be out of stock. He boasts of the number of operations that have been carried out. More than at St Luke’s, we are told. But there is such a long waiting list, and that was because it was allowed to accumulate.

What hurts and worries is not that the claims which the PN leader makes are so boastful and such obvious opinion manipulators. It is that he mouths them so placidly, feeling absolutely no embarrassment. He is comfortable with them, seems really to believe what he says. If he accepts the situation, as he shows he does, how on earth can we expect the situation to improve? How can we expect him to do anything about it, if he thinks all is fine?

He voted coldly for the higher utility tariffs, after offers were turned down to switch to the cheaper, and cleaner fuel that gas is. Oil is running out, the world is awash with gas. But he opted for heavy fuel oil for the power station, though originally heavy fuel oil had been ruled out. Why it was re-considered, brought back into the equation and then accepted, only a few know. It’s their secret and they are not going to share it with us.

Nor will they share the huge illicit gains they made on the government U-turn.

And now he is trying to frighten us with the Labour Party’s gas proposed installations. Which he tells us will be like a bomb waiting to go off.

As if there are no ships on the seas which carry the gas. Ships which ply the stormy Mediterranean, the graveyard of so many vessels. No one has ever described those ships as a bomb. The government itself uses those ships to bring in the gas we use for cooking.

We also had a huge gas tank at Kappara. We used to drive past it every day. No one was ever afraid of going by. No one ever described it as a bomb. And people lived near it.

And it is as if households which have gas cookers do not have gas cylinders. One in use, another standing by as a spare, and maybe another for the heater. Though the latter may have become too much of a luxury for some. Are these cylinders bombs, too?

We also have gas storage facilities, and on the roads we have the gas cylinder trucks, wending their way along narrow streets, as the public walks past. Are they bombs, too? If they are, the government has abdicated all responsibility for our safety.

If that’s all they can come up with to criticise the Labour Party’s power station plans, those plans must be doable. But the PN was too busy dishing out the hefty utility bills, to see the solution Labour came up with.