Guess we’re all liberals now, huh?

In spy movies, it's usually the moment when James Bond (or equivalent) discovers that he has been betrayed by the person who sent him on the mission in the first place. In a romantic comedy, it would be when the protagonist realizes that he or she has fallen in love with a previously despised or mistrusted person, etc.

In election campaigns - which, let's face, have so much in common with movies these days - it tends to be that awkward moment when a party exponent suddenly realizes exactly where and how his party went wrong... and at the same time, desperately tries to make amends for a situation which his party had hitherto doggedly refused to acknowledge as a problem.

This is roughly what happened to the Nationalist Party this week: and the protagonist was Simon Busuttil... who on Sunday observed that the 'liberal wing is finally coming back to the PN'.

Well, what do you know? Finally someone has acknowledged the Partit Nazzjonalista once (long, long ago) had something called a 'liberal wing'... and more importantly, that IT CAN'T WIN THIS ELECTION WITHOUT THE LIBERALS' SUPPORT.

Ah yes. Funny Simon should have noticed this only now, with an election around five weeks away and a 14 point gap between the parties. And yet I've been writing about this same situation literally for years - ever since the PN made the astonishing mistake of declaring WAR on liberals, without pausing to consider that most of these people (myself included) actually come from PN backgrounds, had never voted Labour in our lives, and had no problems voting PN at all, until it started looking positively... wonky.

In fact, when you consider that the PN's liberal wing was instrumental in every PN election victory since 1987 - that's four victories in two decades - I think it is little short of astounding that the same PN actually managed to lose those people in the first place. And this is the thrust of Busuttil's observation, which can be translated roughly as: "Guys: we really (but REALLY) screwed up by not keeping liberal voters on board..."

Well, he is 100% right. I for one cannot even comprehend how the same PN - having tried to put friends of mine in prison for writing and publishing stories it didn't like... and having launched a moral crusade against Malta's microscopic pro-choice population, without apparently noticing that nearly all these people belong firmly within the liberal camp that has traditionally supported the PN anyway - now turns to me and demands my vote almost as a tribute (or day or I say it, as the equivalent of a Sicilian 'pizzo')... when everything it has done over the past 10 years has effectively undermined its own liberal credentials, and made the party as unattractive as possible to the same people whose support it belatedly realizes it actually needs.

Much worse, under its present leadership the PN has degenerated into a conglomerate of religious extremists that is IMPOSSIBLE for any self-respecting liberal to trust, let alone vote for. In recent years we have had finance ministers experiencing visions of weeping Madonnas... 600% increases to penalties associated with 'obscenity' and other 'moral' crimes... not to mention a certain Mosta entrepreneur trying to get into bed with us, in order to prevent 'immoral acts' from taking place when we turn off the lights.

These things did not take place in the 1950s, you know. They took place less than two years ago, and already we are being invited to forget they ever happened.

All of which is of course very positive. I for one am thrilled to hear Simon Busuttil acknowledging that all this was a huge mistake. And the manifesto he just co-authored makes a similar effort to project the opposite image to the one the PN has painstakingly cultivated ever since Gonzi took over in 2004.

It remains, however, slightly difficult to take this transformation seriously, for a great many reasons (of which I will mention just a few):

1) The PN's recent actions belie its claims to want to regain its liberal supporters. The last legislation it hammered through parliament was an IVF law which quite frankly makes me sick. It has no qualms about excluding an entire category of people (homosexuals) from medical treatment; it adopts a prohibitionist approach to surrogate motherhood; and the original draft even purported to set up a witch-hunt style board to determine eligibility on the basis of sexual preference.

Disgusting, and I for one don't see even a thread of liberal thinking anywhere in the mesh. Yet now we are expected to believe that the same party that concocted such a ghastly law, suddenly has no problem with gay adoptions, of all things: by far the most contentious aspect to the entire gay rights issue. Excuse me, but the contradiction here is simply too enormous - and the transformation too sudden - to be anything other than a last-ditch to claw back a handful of lost votes.

2) The same people associated with all the above-mentioned hysterical crusades and moral posturing still occupy their respective positions (except Tonio Borg, who was promoted). Gonzi remains party leader and Prime Minister, after voting against divorce in parliament in defiance of the result of a referendum that had been held on his own insistence. Personally my view is that he should have stepped down immediately after the result became known; but even if that was perhaps too much to expect, it remains a fact that the person at the helm of both party and country has been discredited on a seminal issue to which he also made the unfathomable mistake of tying his party's own future.

How, then, are we expected to believe that the same person can also lead a movement in which liberals can feel at home?

3) It's not just the PN's more liberal voters that have been pushed away of late. It is also the PN's liberal MPs. In the past 10 years we have seen the emergence of a ruthless culture of moral violence perpetrated upon MPs (in a single-seat majority scenario; go figure) who didn't just kowtow to the leadership on absolutely everything. To cite just one example - the attacks on Franco Debono may have in themselves been extreme. But on his mother? I mean, come on: not even a tribe of cannibals from the blackest heart of undiscovered Papua New Guinea would resort to such heinous tactics. And that, of course, was but one example out of many.

I could go on, but the litany of crimes committed against its own supporters, by a party that now begs (with no discernable trace of pride or dignity) for both votes AND money, is truly overwhelming.

But still, they want my vote... so here's the good news for the PN. It's still up for grabs, you know. And here is what your party has to do to get it... if not in this election (let's face it, you left things rather late), at least in five years' time.

1)    Drop the stomach-turning arrogance whereby the PN insists that it is always right about absolutely everything (strangely, seeing as it keeps changing its position on most things); and more importantly, that no one apart from itself can conceivably run the country. This is bullshit - you know it, I know it, even my cat knows it (and she doesn't follow politics much). So just drop it, OK?

2)   Dissociate yourself (and more importantly, your party) from the hate-mongers and the merchants of filth: you know, the gravediggers who desecrate corpses before rigor mortis even has a chance to set in. Believe me, these people will destroy your precious party if you don't clip their wings sooner rather than later. Indeed it may already be too late.

3)    Purge your party of its extreme lunatic fringe. You don't have to liquidate them, you know - or even expel them, if that's what you understood. No, just make sure they don't assume enough power to actually take the party down a path it will later regret. As happened in 2005, and again in 2011. 'Nuff said.

4)    Stop insulting liberals. There are people in this country who just don't share your party's vision re morality and (still less) religion. I am one of them, and while I don't necessarily base my vote on such matters, I do find it difficult to vote for people who make a career out of trying to project me and my beliefs as the fulcrum of all evil. If you don't like my beliefs, then technically you shouldn't want to represent me in parliament. If you do want to represent me, then you have no choice but to put up with my views, whether you like them or not.

There: that should be enough to get you started. Meanwhile... why are you still here? You've only got five weeks to turn things around, you know. So hadn't you better get cracking...?