Hey! I just met you, and this is funny…

Alright, folks: confession time. There is simply too much lunacy to keep up with in this election campaign. Seven whole weeks still to go, and already I am overwhelmed by absurdity. Up to my eyeballs, in fact. And that was before I received yet another, positively cringe-worthy email from the secretary general of the newly rechristened BMP ('Bums of Malta Party'), asking me for... yes, you guessed it... MORE MONEY.

Right. Unfortunately, I made the tragic error of promising myself I would try to be more compassionate and understanding towards my fellow human beings throughout 2013.

You can call it a New Year's Resolution if you like... even if I don't actually celebrate 'the New Year' at all (never saw much to actually celebrate, other than the slow passage of time... which will continue slowly passing us by whether we commemorate it or not).

So in order to avoid setting a whole new world record in the 'Shortest-lived New Year's Resolution in New Year's Resolution history' category - except maybe that classic one about 'giving up smoking', which normally tends to last until around 2am on 1 January - I will henceforth resist the temptation to do a Django Unchained on my former St Aloysius partner in Sixth Form, Paul Borg Olivier, and get all medieval on his sorry email's ass.

But Jesus and the Mary Chain, Paul. What the heck were you even thinking? Look, I don't want to keep going over the same territory here, but... is there any way you can possibly be made to see how totally and utterly silly you look, when you put on that mournful, beaten dog expression of yours, and whine and moan about how Labour has been simply better and more trustworthy at handling its money than your party?

Because that it what you're effectively telling us, Paul. Yes, I know your intention is quite the opposite - that the real purpose behind those painful emails is to get us all to start questioning the source of the Labour Party seemingly bottomless campaign fund.

But there are ways of means of getting a message across... and believe it or not, there are also ways and means of accidentally imparting a different message altogether.

Tell you what: allow me to let you in on a little secret concerning this thing called 'the media' in our country (which you clearly have difficulties understanding). It's not that we're not really interested in uncovering the source of that campaign fund, you know. That is partly why this newspaper has run around a million editorials calling for a party financing act, while your Prime minister did his damnedest (successfully, I am sorry to say) to make sure no such legislation ever saw the light of day.

But think about it for a second, Paul. Isn't it kind of obvious where Labour gets its money? It's not exactly a secret that all major polls currently place the Pl a few dozen light years ahead of the PN. And yes, it is perfectly true that things can change, even at the very last minute... but you go try telling that to Malta's business community, and see what kind of answer you get.

So no, Paul: take it from me. I know what game you're playing at, and what it is you would like us all to think (and above all, write). And I don't blame for coming up with the idea, either... I mean, it's your job to concoct something (anything, at this point) to turn around what has so far been a living, waking nightmare of a campaign for the PN.

But there is a limit to even our credulity here. Sorry, but we are just not going to buy into the conspiracy theory that the PL is currently funded by forces loyal to the Gaddafi family... or by Al Qaeda... or by the Ku Klux Klan, the Romanian Mafia the Global Abortionist Movement, or whatever other equally unlikely terrorist/criminal/lunatic organization you care to name.

Sure, the PN-owned media might try to sell us that line: NET TV, or Radio 101, or Il-Mument, etc. But that only reminds me of something else I've meaning to tell you for ages, Paul. Nobody takes those stations seriously anymore. Not, mind you, because we don't want to take them seriously. I for one would infinitely prefer a serious media empire commanded by the PN, to the woefully unsightly shambles your party presides over at the moment.

But it is actually no longer humanly possible to take your party machinery even remotely seriously... and for some reason, the words 'Boy', 'Cry' and 'Wolf' sprang unbidden to mind when I tried to think why.

But back to that email. Seriously, there are so many things wrong with it that I scarce know where to begin. Let's start with the tone. What you actually sent may have been worded differently, but it still reads vaguely like a case of: "Dear Raphael... Hey! I  just met you, and this is funny - but here's my bank account, now give me money."

Right. Now before I am wildly misunderstand, please note that I don't actually mind zany pop tunes with incredibly daft lyrics... so long as they're sung by sexy little things in sexier little tangas, and ideally at a reasonably safe distance (e.g., on MTV).

But when the general idea comes to me from someone like you, Paul... no offence or anything but you'll forgive me if I don't buy the album.

As for the implicit threat that.... hey! If you don't give us money, Labour will win and it will all be YOUR FAULT!

Well, hate to break it to you, but people like myself - and I am told there are a few of us running around the place these days - just don't really buy into that sort of thing anymore, for two reasons:

1) With the experience of the past few years still so fresh in our memory, people like myself are more concerned with the sort of stuff the PN has allowed itself to get messed up with: you know, stuff like... the occasional mysterious DEATH in police custody, complete with police cover-up, etc; the constant steady stream of vaguely repetitive corruption scandals - commissions here, kickbacks there, bribes in the middle, and yet nobody ever faces any form of disciplinary action whatsoever (unless they cross over to Labour, in which case their fathers will be arrested for drug possession the following day)... not to mention the endless dazzling promises of truly spectacular, mind-blowing projects - White Rocks, Artificial Islands, Golf Courses, Tunnels to Gozo, Space Shuttles to Mars, etc - which somehow never quite manage to get themselves concluded... sometimes never even started at all.

OK, maybe we're being unfair here... maybe we just don't have your superior insight into such matters. But viewed from any other perspective than from halfway up the collective backsides of the Nationalist Party executive...sorry, but the panorama just isn't very inspiring at all.

Yours, Paul, is a government that has abjectly failed to control or even address the problem of corruption; and which has now broken too many promises to be taken seriously with any new ones.

I am sorry to have to break to you, but... there it is.

2) Like it or not, that thing that you are asking us all to part with is called 'money', and... there are always a few uncomfortable questions to be asked before anyone in his right mind will be willing to let it go.

Here's a small question that you may wish to have asked yourself, before so publicly (and, to be blunt, dim-wittedly) informing us that your party is now bankrupt.

What do you actually do with money, Paul? Do you eat it? Use it as wallpaper? Or do you hide away it under the tiles somewhere... only to forget which tiles you hid it under, with the result that you eventually slide into penury in spite of all your wealth (like so many stereotypical countrymen of ours are supposed to have done, according to legend)?

Reason I ask is because... this is not exactly the first time you're asking us for money, Paul. And faced with another request so soon after the last one... some of us are beginning to wonder what actually happens to all this cash your party has been raking in for secretively and for so long (and with so very little to show for it, too).

In fact, your email managed to illustrate precisely how your party, under your own administration, somehow managed to make a rather large sum of money simply disappear without a trace... an achievement which, in this day and age of anti-money laundering legislation (with money being supposedly traceable at every stage of every transaction, so that here in the real world we can no longer get away with undeclared income from any dubious sources) is really quite something, you know.

So tell us, Paul: what happened to the €500,000 your party collected at its annual Christmas fund-raising drive... almost exactly 40 days ago, on December 17 2012?

For your party to have gone through all of half a million euros in only 40 days - that works out at more than €10,000 euros a day, in a case you were wondering - is pretty impressive by any standard. So where did they all go? Did you spend them all on sweets? Because let's face it: you can't have spent half a million euros on billboards... not unless you've also been taken for the mother of all rides.

I've been counting your billboards, you know. You put up less than five since last month. And while I admit that billboards don't come cheap nowadays... even I would find it slightly hard to believe that they cost your party €100,000 a pop.

That would be outrageous even if you hired the Renzo Piano of global electoral campaign billboard design. Seeing, however, as you merely copied Obama's campaign for one billboard, and based another on the visual imagery of The Village People's 1980s smash hit YMCA... well, all I can say is either you've been swindled, or you're trying to swindle us.

And neither sounds like a very promising position for a party secretary general to suddenly find himself in, now does it?