In its 1996 general election campaign, the PN borrowed an idea from the Tories’ attempt to demonise Tony Blair and stuck the top half of Alfred Sant’s face to the bottom of a campaign poster headlined “Ma Tistax Tafdah”, “you can’t trust him”.

Anecdotally that poster, a first brush with explicitly negative campaigning, caused the PN some backlash, maybe alienated some voters who had not yet made up their mind about Alfred Sant, then contesting his first election as party leader. The 1996 PN campaign was, until then, the glitziest electoral campaign by any political party. It was also an election the PN lost, so it is unwise to trust hindsight. The only way to know for real if a campaign poster has worked is by surveying the reaction.

By the second day of this electoral campaign Labour rolled out their first negative poster. Contrasting with their pastel “Malta flimkien” and “Robert 2020”, a dark billboard shows PN’s headquarters split asunder. The message is that there is disunity within the PN. The PN’s election to power would bring about disunity in the country.

The speed with which the poster came up suggests Labour were not altogether surprised by the departure announcements of Clyde Puli, Kristy Debono, and Mario Galea on the first day of the campaign. Of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure. But the three belonged to the Adrian Delia campaign and that campaign never had any qualms about coordinating their stunts with the Labour Party and its media.

This video is reinforcing the message on the billboard.

The ‘division’ argument is neither here nor there. It is true that people perceive ‘unity’ as equivalent to ‘strength’, and division, therefore, as a sign of weakness. But that’s not exactly a strong suit for Labour, is it? They have a Joseph Muscat problem. His name is becoming unmentionable at Labour events, his spectral presence conspicuous, his online shenanigans distracting and ominous. No one thinks Labour is a paradise of open love.

As the video above shows, the underlying theme of the campaign is not the infighting as such. It is the identification of figures of hate, that have featured for months and years as daily targets of One TV. These are pictures of people viewers of One have been programmed to hate. And they are people the wider country has been surreptitiously programmed to despise without knowing exactly why. “Ma Tistax Tafdahom”.

Look at this poster from Labour’s 2013 campaign. The theme wasn’t enmity then, it was rather the opposite: friendship. Figures of hate – note, significantly the inclusion of Daphne Caruana Galizia who is the odd one out in that line-up for not having been a politician – are shown alongside Lawrence Gonzi to bleed hatred of those hate figures on the relatively less despised party leader.

The present campaign (about enemies rather than about friends) presents the identical message. I am annoyed, but have no right to be surprised, that I feature in this video. I, alongside Robert Aquilina for heading Repubblika, have been targeted as a figure of hate by the Labour Party for some time and now I’m being used as ballast to weigh the PN down.

Just because they’ve seen it all before, doesn’t mean they won’t fall for it. As a Labour voter who didn’t know me recently had occasion to tell me after a couple of coffees and a chinwag, it can be surprising to someone who gets to know me outside of One TV that I don’t actually eat babies for breakfast.

If you only know me from the way I look in that video, I don’t blame you for thinking I do.