The PN media machine asked me, earlier this week, if I had watched the PN leader speak to the PN Convention, held last Sunday.

I did not, I replied.

However, later I happened on a clip showing excerpts of Dr Busuttil's speech on Facebook.

I thought it started with a nice touch, showing Dr Busuttil walking in and being greeted by the faithful, and then kissing his girlfriend on the lips. Others may find that was too staged, too rehearsed.

But then, many might find the entire speech as too staged, too rehearsed. Then this newsroom revealed that foreign experts have been giving Dr Busuttil lessons in public speaking.

I cannot say he did not need it. I watched a few seconds of his speech on Independence Day and frankly, he was pathetic. His tone was strident, shrill; he was not dominating his audience but succumbing to it. He kept reading his prepared notes as a lecture in class and probably got the same response: people just stopped listening.

Anyway, private lessons or not, this time he was far better: his voice was better modulated and had none of the shrillness of the Granaries speech.

He shed his jacket and walked about the stage, which may have left some of his audience somewhat disoriented. What struck me, however, is how much Simon Busuttil is following in the footsteps of a certain Joe Muscat. The Labour leader, we all remember, memorised his speeches in the pre-electoral period as much as Dr Busuttil did his on Sunday.

There were differences too, Dr Muscat stood on a podium and had an autocue to remind him of his text. The speeches were carefully crafted; actually they overdid it with the coda of similarly-ending phrases and sentences building up to a climax.

Now Dr Muscat's speeches, impressive though they may have been to those who ended up voting for him, cannot be said to have been the reason for the PL victory. Nor will Dr Busuttil's elocution lessons, on their own, bring him electoral success.

If it's significant, I note that Dr Busuttil's clip was only shared by people one can call the old guard of the party, like Paul Borg Olivier; at least what I saw did not have any of the new breed of aspiring PN politicians or even non-party members rooting for the 'new' Simon Busuttil. He has a long way to go, and, if I were him, I would go cautiously on waxing idyllic about any election victory.

I repeat I did not watch the entire speech but only the clip on Facebook, but zooming out of this one speech I have been having problems understanding his strategy. Sometimes I feel that he and his party have become too accommodating, while at other times he goes into overdrive and becomes overly intransigent.

He was not consulted before Karmenu Vella was chosen as Commissioner but his MEPs voted for Mr Vella, despite his unsatisfactory and bumbling performance in the European Parliament hearing.

On the other hand, he has been demanding his pound of flesh because the power station is not ready on time (it has barely begun construction), as was his right in the parliamentary dialectics, and his party's media has now discovered the reality of a Chinese sweatshop factory which they did not discover in all the 25 years they spent in government.

I doubt if the public at large noticed the new revamped Simon Busuttil, not even those who follow politics closely.

Nor will they have noticed the new and untried candidates Dr Busuttil has been announcing. Nor the new focus groups his party has created, although, of course, that is mainly back office stuff. Nor is the public energised by internal appointments in the party structure.

What seems to matter to the public is the dire state of the party's finances and the fact it has had to let many people go after facing a financial meltdown. The question, obviously brought up time and again by opponents any time the party attempts to criticise the government on the economy, is: how credible can PN be when it made such a mess of its own finances? To which the party can deliver a credible reply by steadfastly pointing at the many cases of abuse of public property by successive Labour governments and by refusing to buy the PL barrage of counter-accusations as we heard in Parliament last week.

Which brings me to the nub of the matter.

The PN leadership must learn to choose its battles better and to have a better strategy to go to the public with.

First of all, as stated earlier, it is far too early to speak about election victories, not even on local council level. Not after the two huge drubbings the party received in recent months.

It is undoubted that there is a growing number of disaffected PL voters, especially those who switched in March last year, but rather than do a Joe Muscat and aim to please the disaffected, PN must promote, first and foremost, a consciously good and responsible government, which was not much in evidence in the last years of the Gonzi government. Aiming to get votes, it was beaten at its own game by Dr Muscat and we are now reaping the consequences. To rekindle such a race would lead Malta to very dangerous grounds.

To go eyeball-to-eyeball with the government on such things as the new power station and/or Chinese involvement may be worthwhile but there may be richer pickings. It may be tempting to switch to an anti-Chinese bandwagon especially if Air Malta is going that way too, but a look around shows that there are many countries in Europe which are angling for Chinese investment (some public but mostly private - which we do not seem to be getting much of), and there is a race to get direct air routes from Beijing and Shanghai. So why do we have to play virginal politics and keep away?

The government is very weak on the economy, whatever Moody's says. The 58c a week increase (or whatever will come out) is a very useful tool to beat the government with especially in the eyes of its followers who will now find government recruitment shrivelling up in the light of the Commission's strictures, and all the huge salaries the government gave its key figures. This is a worker's government, not a dirty capitalist one.

The fact that Malta has once again been singled out as the worst country to do business in among the EU member states, and that in some areas we have even deteriorated, is the single most damning indictment the present government could get in its search for FDI. So too its stakes in the competitiveness rankings, whatever the ministers may declare

In the end, the PN pressure on the lateness of the power station replacement did pay dividends, as shown by the savage attacks on George Pullicino by Konrad Mizzi (though I shuddered when I heard Dr Busuttil's very lukewarm defence - if that's the word - of Pullicino).

Telling the government it did not keep its word and its timelines was good as it went, finding out the flaws and inconsistencies may reap results, but not as much, I firmly believe, as offering good governance, and freely admitting that the 2004 - 2013 government was not a shiny example of that, despite the intentions.

Treating the public with unheard of arrogance was the cherry on the cake.

 

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