This has been a summer of an extraordinary and lengthy heat which is not over yet.

It has also been a summer of international tension, first because of the North Korean threats, then because of the renewed spate of terror attacks in Barcelona and Finland, as well as the imploding Trump administration.

But here in Malta attention has been focused throughout this long, hot summer on the Nationalist Party leadership saga which has now run itself into the shallows and brought itself to a standstill.

The campaign still has a month to run and two votes too but it has come as a huge disappointment to PN supporters and the Maltese in general. This side of the general election, no candidate can be said to have generated enthusiasm or anything like party spirit. Whether this can be generated after someone is chosen as party leader is still to be seen. On the contrary, supporter after supporter have been writing that the four candidates do not inspire trust.

Besides, at this point of the campaign, the party is seriously splitting up between the four candidates and one can easily discern the underlying tension not just between the candidates (the friendly faces are now revealed as being masks), but even more between their supporters. You can sense the anger, the animosity, the backstabbing, the fingers pointing at the past, the searching for whoever is behind this or that candidate and by extension who is angling to be the power behind the throne of the next leader.

This is how low the party has sunk, how the two successive election defeats have shown the sheer inadequacy of the party which brought Malta into the EU and the euro.

Nor has the campaign become a contest of ideas, or of political stances, with one exception, as I will explain. It is mainly a contest between personalities – the outsider, the old-timer, the accountant, and the politician. Whatever they are calling position papers, are just essays in hype, giving as least hostages as they can, and making sounds they must think are agreeable. As to what they will be doing when elected party leader, that is still up in the air, whatever they may say.

I will start with what I call the exception – Frank Portelli. He is the only candidate who speaks of taking back the party to its old roots. But then he mixes in statements verging on homophobia and racism. There certainly is a bedrock of this among the party grassroots. For instance, Claudio Grech replied to a TMID leader which expressed worries about migration with some strong sentiments. But you wouldn’t find Mr Grech supporting Dr Portelli.

Besides this, Dr Portelli, in my opinion, has been showing he is inadequate as a party leader at least in my regard. He uses Facebook as his preferred mode of contact, just as Trump uses Twitter. He said that I should have checked my facts before writing. I replied that he should write and explain where I went wrong. Instead, he fobbed me off with a totally irrelevant Latin quote. Then, and I resent this very much, he wrote what he believes should have been a letter of apology from me. It is more or less clear from his words, but I want to make it clear I wrote no such letter of apology nor do I intend to.

And he is not right, either. He says the total financial position of St Philip’s Hospital must take into account not just the debts but also the land, the fixed assets, etc. Why doesn’t he tell that to HSBC and its efforts to get back the €12 million he reportedly owes the bank? Does he think we are idiots?

And that doesn’t minimally address the point I made – that he tried to sell the hospital to Dr Gonzi’s administration and, when they turned it down, he began to heavily attack that administration from Super One TV, hoping no doubt to sell the hospital to the new Labour administration. When this also fell through, he emerged as a candidate to lead PN.

Enough of Dr Portelli. He does not merit any more.

Adrian Delia continued to go round party clubs and to every festa running (as did other candidates less Dr Portelli). Asked for his assets and liabilities he had said, implausibly, he would do that only if elected. Now faced with revelations by MaltaToday and Daphne about his business links and debts, he has said he will commission an audit and reveal its findings.

Then, he continues to issue statements that cannot amount to any firm commitment. And he has yet to explain his stand as regards construction and development seeing he is a developer himself in a sense.

You get the feeling that many are thinking Dr Portelli and Dr Delia will not make it past the first hurdle, though this could be wishful thinking. Or as a result of the clique running the party, according to another interpretation. That makes these two the outsiders gunning against the insiders. That’s one interpretation of the PN battle that only the first poll can solve.

Perici Calascione speaks mainly of party structures as if he was the deputy head for party affairs. Not for him the wider perspective of Malta, its government, policies, the world. There will be many who will ask him what his role was in the deal with db and the cedoli venture.

Chris Said is the remaining candidate, the one who has not attracted the animosity like the others have. He has been careful to distance himself from Simon Busuttil and has taken to party leader if not prime ministerial poses and events – suit and jacket, press conferences at strategic places (soon imitated by the others), and always emphasising his experience. As though the Maltese electorate had not already found the Gonzi Cabinet lacking in 2013.

Of course, we do not know the deals being done behind our backs, who will get what in return for support. We see the candidates but not who is supporting them, which may be as important or perhaps even more important. We have to assume the delegates and voters will know this background when they vote in the coming weeks.

But mainly, as I said earlier, the over-riding sensation is of a party at odds with itself, a party that has lost any vision it may have, a party riddled with cross-currents and cross-animosities. The party still has to find its soul and its vision. Maybe a new leader will deliver all this once he is elected, but in their present form, none of these four can do miracles.