Will the PN election solve anything?

I did not stay up last night biting my nails while waiting to see who will be the new PN leader, and that’s not because I already know the outcome.

The contest has been a rather uneven one, reversing the previous leadership contest. Then Adrian Delia had been the man to beat, the outsider who was taking on what he and his supporters called the establishment. Now, as leader of the party and as Leader of the Opposition, he is the establishment of the party and he was facing an outsider.

The preceding paragraph shows that, like others, I am expecting Bernard Grech to win and become the new PN leader. Apart from the surveys, there are other indications people expect him to win, not least the Labour Party itself which has redoubled its attacks on him as witnessed by the Grech-Greek doctored clip which made it sound as if he were some kind of a moron to joke about himself.

This was a very flat joke in the first place and its use by the Labour spin shows the paucity of weapons in their armoury.

The other arguments in the campaign were more substantial and the very fact they were laid aside shows that not much mileage could be squeezed out of them.

Bernard Grech comes across as just another man with problems with the tax people (and who doesn’t?), maybe not too careful with paper work and maybe those students coming and going in his house were not just friends of his children. Again, nothing new here.

I don’t know the man, never met him and he obviously dedicated his time to meet party delegates rather than outsiders.

All one had to go by were the reports of some of his speeches and (maybe that’s the low quality of reporting for you) and they do not set the world on fire.

Again, his task was to introduce himself to people who maybe did not know him. There was no shared past, not even as in Delia’s case, a shared past with Birkirkara FC. Like Melchizedek of biblical times, he came from nowhere.

His speeches did not rest on public articles or published statements. Yet the majority of the party’s MPs seem to have plumped for him to the exclusion of some considerable (at least in my opinion) candidates.

Maybe his best advantage is precisely this – he does not have Delia’s disadvantages, not just his larger exposure to the taxman but more the perception he is more amenable to the Labour establishment.

Delia would probably consider this last statement as erroneous, if not downright libellous. After all, he has waged a real battle on the sale of the hospitals.

But the more the government apologists attacked Grech, the more people concluded they absolutely did not want Grech. One such apologist even said that with Grech we will be back to Simon Busuttil’s time which he described almost as next to armed insurrection.

Were it not for the concurrent news coming out of the Law Courts that are proving Busuttil (and Daphne Caruana Galizia) more right than they have ever been.

Bernard Grech has not been, to my knowledge, part of the Daphne-Busuttil group nor has he been lighting candles and leaving flowers at the various Daphne shrines. But equally clearly, he has definitely not been on the side of the Daphne denigrators of which Delia, at least for some time, was part of. That is an endorsement in itself.

If this morning’s news confirms what I’m saying, hard work awaits the winner. Not least to establish a credible platform for the party as it contests any coming election. Opposing Labour and whoever is leading them is not enough, as they were not enough in 2013 and 2017.