The decision to have the Nationalist Party’s leader elected by the party members, though well intentioned, is likely to be the party’s undoing. It is astonishing that the inevitable consequences of a popular vote were not foreseen: that it would recreate the polarisation, bitter enmity, factions and risks of a general election campaign though on a smaller scale. When you introduce 22,000 electors into the equation, rather than sticking to your original 1,200-strong electorate of party councillors, you also bring in the need for full-scale campaigning, with all that entails. And then there is no going back from the fall-out.

Widening the electorate to party members also made it possible for somebody to literally walk in off the street and cause the chaos which is splitting the Nationalist Party asunder. The person who walks in off the street with a desire to take over does not care about the damage he causes to the organisation he desires to lead, because he has never worked in it, with it or for it, and doesn’t care about it but merely sees it a vehicle for his own self-interest, as do his cronies. So, the damage is of no concern.

Couldn’t a person still have walked in off the street and put himself forward for election to the party leadership, under the old system? Yes, of course he could. In 2013, Ray Bugeja did. But under that system, creating the impression of a wave of popular support would not have made the blindest bit of difference. And it wouldn’t have happened anyway, because it would have seemed totally out of place and megalomaniacal to run about the country stirring up the crowds for three months as the means to persuading 1,200 councillors to vote for you.

But now we have somebody who walked in off the street doing exactly that – using the impression of popular support to influence the councillors and, in turn, the party members. It is a very weird situation. And no, none of it could have happened without all that expensive campaigning up and down the country and the constant heavy advertising and – above all – support from those within the Nationalist Party itself who wish to carry out a palace coup of sorts.

Except that it is not a palace coup at all, because those always involve somebody else within the palace taking it over. It is an internal coup. This is different: the equivalent of a coup d’etat, in which external forces take over the palace with the help of disloyal staff within. And with the population outside divided between those who are excited by the chaos and destruction – who, indeed, see chaos and destruction as the thrilling precursor to building afresh – and those who are horrified by it all because they can’t see sense in destroying something to build something else, rather than carrying on with or altering a building programme.

And this is exactly the problem. Many people are attracted to Adrian Delia not because they want change but, if you listen carefully to what they mean by change, more properly because they are excited by chaos. The more apparent the damage becomes that he is doing to the party even before he is elected, the more excited they become. This is a known factor in human nature, particularly when people lead otherwise boring and humdrum lives, and the chaos provides them with the adrenalin rush they need, or when they live in a state of anxiety and the turbulence in they see gives them an emotional outlet for their own stresses. In another era, they would have been the people thrilled by the sight of revolutionaries rushing into the homes and palaces of “the elite” and ransacking them, or guillotining the privileged brought to the scaffold bound in wooden carts.Fortunately, in the present the violence does not extend beyond insults, spitting, curses and piling onto the Opposition leader’s car or pushing and shouting at those who are loyal to him.

The sentiment is nothing new, even though it flies the flag of the New Way. It is an old one, known to history, and not necessarily with beneficial results. What we are talking about here, though, is not the administration of a country, but the leadership of a political party. And while an electorate or population that divides itself into different groups of incompatible opinions is a normal and desirable thing in a democracy – unless it turns into the extreme of civil war as it did in Northern Ireland, of course – in a political party whose entire raison d’etre is that it is a rallying point for supporters who share the same political views and ideals, alienating great swathes of your own supporters is obviously a non-starter.

If – or perhaps that should be when – Adrian Delia is elected on Saturday, there are going to be thousands of people without a political home or party to vote for. Those who support him seem to be counting on the belief that all those who have voted for the Nationalist Party this far fall into the category of ‘political fans’ just as they do, and will carry on voting Nationalist. They couldn’t be more wrong. The Nationalist Party’s vote deficit has worsened since June with these terrible scenes. When Delia is elected, the vote deficit will take a further knock, and there is no climbing back from that in five years. His election will mean, first and foremost, that more people will start voting Labour who previously voted Nationalist. Because if you’re going to vote for somebody bent, you might as well vote for the one who has done the job already.