Opinionist Kevin Cassar considers PN MP Alex Borg to be one of Labour's Trojan horses within the PN since he believes that Gozitan Borg isn't fighting for Gozo's past, let alone its future.

This emerged last April in connection with the Fort Chambray controversy after Borg defended the Fort's concession to Gozitan businessman Michael Caruana and after Borg condemned his fellow MPs' theatrics in Parliament in light of MP Karol Aquilina alleging that the Speaker is hardly able to think, and after Borg publicly admired Trump's authenticity.

Cassar then rhetorically asks a few questions: "Doesn't Borg form part of a political party? Why is he proposing to fight for Gozo's future alone, unaided, unassisted?" He then concludes, "An ego that huge sends alarm bells ringing, especially when it belongs to a novice first-term MP."

Thereafter, some PN MPs flocked to Borg's defence.

Former PN leader Adrian Delia summed up the article as a senseless attack, arguing that attacking a young, energetic man working to offer an alternative government makes no sense unless you want to weaken the PN and strengthen the corrupt government.

Joe Giglio, too, considered the piece a senseless attack on Alex Borg by someone who is supposed to be pulling the same rope as theirs.

Similarly, Charles Azzopardi expressed his uneasiness with Cassar's article.

Admittedly, the Trojan horse has become a little less literal since Odysseus came up with the idea of hiding his troops in a giant wooden ungulate, gifting the structure to the impenetrable Troy, only for the Greek army to emerge at night within the city's walls and slaughter their unsuspecting enemies.

Reflecting on Kevin Cassar's uncharacteristic negative comments on Alex Borg in his notorious article, it's clear he relied on the Trojan Horse political cliché as a crutch for slamming a budding political heavyweight as being somehow nefarious and ill-intentioned, but without having to supply any convincing explanation of how. As with the original, it all makes for a satisfying story, though it reveals more about the accusers' desperate position than whoever's being called a metaphorical horse.

Politicians and pundits have been slinging the Trojan Horse accusation at their enemies for literally centuries.

While there's a certain amount of theatre and strategy behind labelling an opponent a Trojan Horse, particularly when you're lacking in good political dirt, Cassar's suspicion seemed to be bigger than mere literary metaphor. His belief in a Trojan Horse instead dovetailed with his perception that Alex Borg is one in the dark shadows, conspiring with the PN's enemy against them.

Kevin Cassar would have wanted us to know that by permitting Borg to individually express himself, the PN is unwittingly bringing in a Trojan Horse, which will eventually spell doom for it. Cassar appears to think that the PN and Borg risk becoming sworn enemies and will engage in war against each other.

That is thinking devoid of imagination.

It is the politics of the absurd. And Cassar's comments are a hint of what the PN has failed to do in all these years since it went out of power in 2013.

Modern politics speaks of political parties going into reflective mode once they lose power. They are expected to analyse the reasons why the electorate turned their backs on them. And from such analyses, it is expected that these parties will redefine their policies and recast them in ways which give them hope of returning to power at a point in the future.

The PN has done nothing of the sort. Should it see danger in Alex Borg's open, public, unrestrained, albeit sometimes controversial views on more than one national topic, it would be a sign that the party is not yet ready to embrace the realities which define modern diplomacy.

Politics is essentially a matter of taking a measured, long-term view of circumstances both at home and abroad. It is not to be pursued in anger, in a use of diatribe, or in a release of emotions which can only expose the bankruptcy of the men and women engaging in such an unenlightened exhibition of it.

Cassar feels that the individual attitudes, reactions and stances taken by Borg risk making him and his PN subservient to Robert Abela's Labour. In what way might that happen?

In politics, playing to the gallery for a while may be all right. But for it to develop into a habit, for any political leader or political party, at a point, it becomes worrying. And it is worrying, because the attitude is indicative of poor judgement, because it highlights the image of a political organisation happy to remain trapped in ideas which have never had much of an appeal.

Conspiracy theories do not enrich a party. Inventing horses, Trojan or real, and passing them off as wisdom is poor judgement.

This Trojan horse row might eventually be remembered more for turning out to be a crude witch-hunt.

The story of the Trojan Horse is ultimately a lesson in heeding warnings, although Cassar makes a less-than-convincing Cassandra if we extend the metaphor that far.

 Instead, all his crying "horse" perhaps only reveals how much his notorious article grasped to find a convincing threat in Borg. Perhaps he should have worked on tweaking the metaphor; after all, at least "a wolf in sheep's clothing" is still a wolf underneath. All it takes is a little pulping for a Trojan Horse to turn out to be a paper tiger.