Happy clappers

In fact, looking back at the whole thing, it is hard to pinpoint which part of the entire farce was the more entertaining. Was it that so many people saw the result of Saturday's 'election' (i.e., Gonzi winning against no opposition whatsoever - gee, who would have ever guessed?) as something worth celebrating in the first place? Or was it the hilarious lengths to which Gonzi's more vocal supporters tried to distort the whole affair, trying to make it look slightly less embarrassing than it actually was?

I don't know, but watching the video of the following day's general council, I got this unmistakable impression that while the happy clappers among the party faithful were happy to clap away - thus swallowing the official party line (not to mention hook and sinker) that this was some kind of resounding triumph for Gonzi - there was at least one person who very clearly failed to publicly share that interpretation.

That person was Lawrence Gonzi himself, whose speech - to his credit, I might add - was hardly what you would call 'triumphal' at all. Sure, he made all the right noises to please the type of audience he actually had in front of him; but there was something in his demeanour which (to my mind, anyway) suggested that he himself remained unconvinced... and possibly, also a little unnerved.

Quite rightly, too, I would say. Because although Gonzi officially 'won' 96.5% of the vote - and against such stiff competition, too! Honestly, he must be so relieved - deep down in his heart of hearts he surely must know that only a true dimwit would fail to appreciate two inescapable facts about the entire contest.

One, that the whole exercise was very clearly and very unconvincingly contrived; and two, that it was also counter-productive in the long term.

Let me limit myself only to the second consideration (I think pretty much everything has already been said about the first). True, the mobilization of the PN's full College of Cardinals... oops! Sorry, I meant 'Councillors' - may well have achieved its primary objective: i.e., that of getting Franco Debono to shut the Franco up.

But in so doing, the leadership contest also elicited no-shows from two other backbenchers, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Jesmond Mugliett (not to mention Frank Portelli)... thus cementing the widely-shared perception that these two gentlemen, on whom Gonzi also depends for his parliamentary majority, do not exactly  much faith in their leader either.

One of them, Mugliett, actually said so in as many words. The election, he said, "only goes to reaffirm the GonziPN system, a system which I wished to see the PN and government leave behind and move towards a more inclusive system.."

So even if Gonzi remains 'Mr Popular' among 96.5% of the party councillors - 70% of whom were appointed by Gonzi anyway - his hold over parliament has arguably weakened as a result of Saturday's vote. In a nutshell: where before he had one government MP publicly voicing loss of confidence in his leadership... he now has no fewer than three.

And yes, it is true that neither Pullicino Orlando nor Mugliett will actively work to bring their own government down. But as the former so ably illustrated with last year's divorce campaign, disgruntled MPs can make their Prime Minister's life very difficult for them... without necessarily precipitating an all-out political crisis.

The second concern is slightly more academic in nature. Clearly, Lawrence Gonzi has given his party die-hards (the same happy-clappers who like nothing more than to bang on the Perspex and chant mindless slogans, for all the world as if they were football hooligans) something to cheer about for a change.

But as I suspect he himself knows perfectly well, Gonzi's problems on a national level are not with that particular category of voter... which will (let's face it) continue enthusiastically supporting the PN even if it were led by the chair I am sitting on at this precise instance.

On the contrary, it is an altogether different and more discerning category of voter that Gonzi knows he has to win over; and needless to add, such voters are by definition a good deal harder to impress.

Like I said earlier, Gonzi can be called many things, but he is not exactly a moron. He therefore knows perfectly well that shenanigans of the kind we saw on Saturday not only fail to impress such voters... but they are precisely the sort of  they find off-putting.

So for what it's worth, this my interpretation of his speech the following day. Having overcome the immediate hurdle, and consolidated his grass-roots support, Gonzi now has to go back to the drawing board, and try to reinvent his leadership as something that can appeal to the more intelligent and demanding PN voter.

I also got the impression that this is a belated realization on his part; that there must have been a point in the build-up to Saturday's farce when Gonzi suddenly understood how very silly he and his party were beginning to look, in the eyes of precisely the type of voter he knows he has to target.

Perhaps his attention was drawn to this fact by an adviser; or perhaps he worked it out all on his own. Either way, it doesn't really matter. The truly important thing at this stage is that he now does something - anything - to overturn the depressing image that Saturday's election left in the minds of many borderline floating voters... the image of a roaring mass of predominantly male sycophants, deliriously singing their glorious leader's praise for all the world like they were genetically mass-produced in the bowels of the PN headquarters in Pieta'.

What can he do, I hear you ask? Well, at this stage... I have absolutely no idea.