Hearing and reading certain expressions being bandied about, you’d think Lawrence Gonzi has died. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’ and all that.

It would, of course, be a very different situation had Dr Gonzi tried to do what Alfred Sant did between April and May 2003, when after losing yet another election (not forgetting the referendum) and having declared he was resigning as party leader, he made an about turn during the 1 May celebrations in what used to be Freedom Square, without telling any of his top deputies (although somebody else knew and had prepared a choreography of posters asking him to go back).

Had Dr Gonzi been tempted to withdraw his resignation maybe not all the comments would have been so fulsome.

I detect a more than a slight tinge of hypocrisy in all this. Here is the man who singlehandedly led the party to its most ignominious defeat ever being praised to high heavens as if he did nothing wrong.

Yet even I, who have been among his harshest critics, am more than sorry to see the man go. Whatever his faults, he has taken full responsibility for the defeat and is falling on his sword like a man. Of such are legends born.

He has not blamed others, not looked around for excuses, nor offered explanations that exonerate him.

And every day that passes, comparing him with the present incumbent resonates more and more in Dr Gonzi’s favour.

Nostalgia for the very recent past is only just re-appearing but will blossom and bloom as time goes by.

Of course, this is all psychological healing for the PN grass roots as they come to terms with losing the country.

In a way, however, they are very much still in denial. Dr Gonzi is shouldering full responsibility for the defeat yet they all mourn his passing. Identifying what went wrong and why the former Opposition gained all those 37,000 votes comes later, much later, when people can take the medicine, if ever they can.

There will be, from today onwards, much hype and excitement about the new PN leader and he will become the new poster boy until he too faces the test of the electorate. The March 2013 election defeat will be forgotten and relegated to the backburner. And there will be strategies galore for people to cosy up to the new leader and somehow get onboard the new electoral machine hoping for better times.

The Maltese electorate has shown, in March, what a fickle lot they are and, who knows, maybe next time they will swing back after having had a taste of Labour.

This is the stuff, I said, of which legends are made. And in fact, it is a legend. To understand things like that means to misunderstand all that has happened, Labour’s victory and Dr Gonzi’s hand in the defeat.

So on his hopefully first day as a private citizen, allow me please to break the circle of sycophants and, early as it is, map out the declining road that led to defeat.

The seeds of the defeat go back to the 2008 election victory, attained through hard work and doggedness by Dr Gonzi first of all. Instead of realizing the slim victory was a terrible alarm call, Dr Gonzi et al believed it fully allowed them to act out their fantasies and structure the country along ways that only the people at Castille harboured. They stopped listening. They grew bored of even trying to deliver to people what they had promised them.

Instead of troublesome ministers being reined in hard and kept on a short leash, they were allowed full freedom to act as they saw fit. The end result was an explosion of ministerial arrogance such as we might not see for a long time (though this present PL government is trying really hard to outdo it).

There were also the canny tactics adopted by Labour, the ‘Taghna lkoll’ mantras, the modulated and moderate tones used as PN lost its head in vituperative slogans, stories and billboards.

Mainly, however Dr Gonzi drove himself, and his party with him, into the wall. Of course there is the huge moral stature of the man, his courageous stand in the Libya crisis, his honesty and hard work and the macro-economic policies that kept Malta afloat when all others were sinking but still Dr Gonzi must have realized he was heading for the wall and he kept driving full speed at it.

Could the situation be reversed, I kept asking myself. For some time I thought it could, then I realized it was too late for that, the situation was heavily compromised. Hence a fatalistic tone underlined many thoughts and writings.

Dr Gonzi has given enough signals in the past weeks; he intends to step down as Leader of the Opposition, even as an MP, once the new PN leader is appointed. He does not want to be an Alfred Sant on the back of his successor.

Unfortunately, Malta does not have an institution for past Prime Ministers and they, from Mintoff to KMB, find it extremely hard to slip into the anonymity of private life. We do not have a forum, an institution, where the advice of past holders of office could be useful to the country as a whole. We have no senate as we used to have.

It’s a pity to see all that talent go to waste, and here I am referring to Dr Gonzi’s talent. There remains Europe which has become for many countries a sort of Senate without a Senate. Dr Gonzi was one of the oldest members of the European Council when he last attended it in February. There are few people with his experience and the sagacity of his advice. Somehow, however, I doubt that Dr Gonzi would want to submit to popular vote once again in his lifetime (although Alfred Sant is doing precisely that).

I really do not see him either as going back to the private sector from where he came as Austin Gatt is doing with his new appointment at the Hili Group. Nor do I see him taking his grandchildren to the Marsascala Family Park or playing football with them.

He is still relatively young (he turns 60 on 1 July), he is the family man, not given to the social whirl, hard working but no bookworm and he will surely not emulate Gerhardt Schroeder and become head of a Russian energy giant. Nor will he be like George Borg Olivier and become the president of the La Valette Band.

From now onwards he is his own man and it’s his life after all. But from this side of the fence, and from many people who agree with what I write, there is still this huge rage at the loss of the election but also a huge sense of loss that such a man, his moral stature above all, the quality of his character and his beliefs will henceforth no longer illumine the country.

Another country could find a use for such a person, but small Malta, which needs to retain all the few people it has, seems to believe it is able to do without them. And even the party, which he led and of which he was one of the most exceptional emblems, both ‘religio’ as well as ‘patria’, seems in an awful hurry to turn a corner and leave him behind.

No party is a lamb after an election defeat and PN can sometimes be far more cruel to its former leaders than Labour.

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