While I am writing this, the new Nationalist Party leader has yet to speak at the Independence Eve mass rally and so I do not know whether he is about to make an announcement about how he plans to acquire a seat in parliament.

Meanwhile, Malta's intellectually-challenged ambassador to Greece, Joseph Cuschieri, has seized the day and described on Facebook - where else - how he agreed to give up his seat to Joseph Muscat even before Muscat put his name down as a contender in the Labour Party's leadership election in 2008, following Alfred Sant's third consecutive general election defeat.

Muscat, he said, had told him he didn't want to enter the race without knowing for certain that he had a seat at the end of it - for he, like Adrian Delia, had no seat in the Maltese parliament.

Unlike Delia, however, he did have one in the European Parliament and could claim to have the support of the wider electorate. Cuschieri said that he asked for nothing in return.

That's as may be, but the reality is that he was given a sinecure by the Labour Party, put on the party payroll as a 'consultant', marking time until Malta got its sixth seat in the European Parliament, which he was promised would be his. And he got it.

When that tragic stint was done, Cuschieri still felt he was owed a living in return for his heroic sacrifice several years earlier, even though Muscat had meanwhile been elected to parliament on his own steam in 2013.

And that is how a man with no social or linguistic skills to speak of, and with the intelligence quotient of the contents of my greengrocer's truck, has come to be our man in Athens, where he resides still.

But the point to be made here is that Muscat made the arrangements for a seat before ploughing ahead with the contest to become party leader.

That is entirely consonant with his personality of strategising every last detail and leaving nothing to chance.

It would have put him in a weaker position, and a wholly embarrassing one, to be a leader without a seat, having to start casting around for one as Adrian Delia is doing now.

Delia struck me at the outset as a 'do now, think about the consequences later' sort of person, and most of the stories we have heard about him since he came to public notice this past summer point to that unfortunate personality trait.

His statement of affairs, at least as he published it, certainly shows this, with its significant debts, his reliance on credit cards and overdrafts at the age of almost 50 and with a wife and five children to support, and no sign of how he plans to pay €43,600 in bank interest, €26,000 in privateschool bills and a variety of other standard and nonstandard living expenses every year, off an Opposition leader's salary of just €43,000.

Apparently, he has "engaged financial consultants" to give him advice.

In that case, they must be the same consultants who helped Jesus Christ feed the multitudes with five fishes and a loaf of bread.

Truly, Delia must take the lot of us for fools simply because many are credulous, desperate or just plain stupid enough to believe his rubbish.

That Opposition leader's salary, of course, is dependent on his becoming Opposition leader in the first place, for which he requires that seat in parliament.

Each time journalists asked, during the leadership election campaign, how he planned to get into parliament so as to be able to become Opposition leader, Delia brushed off the legitimate curiosity and said, "It's all sorted. I have a plan."

When people say that, the thing to do is not to trust them. People with real plans tend to be a little more forthcoming than issuing a terse retort and then clamming up and changing the subject.

Now it turns out, what a surprise, that he had no plan at all: get elected first, and then we'll see. Perhaps he assumed that members of parliament who campaigned hard for their seat would be falling over themselves to give it to him, even for a fee called a consultancy position. He thought wrong.

The seats into which he can be co-opted immediately without the inconvenience of a casual election are held by Godfrey Farrugia ("forget it"), Karol Aquilina ("like hell I will"), Ivan Bartolo ("I'll give a stranger my kidney but I won't give Delia my seat"), David Stellini (obviously not, because he has given up his job and house in Brussels, and uprooted his young family and moved them to Gozo to start a new life, because of that seat), and Maria Deguara ("thanks, but no thanks").

The interesting thing is that Delia and his circus troupe of villains and other assorted hangers-on appear to have relied heavily on Maria Deguara giving up her seat.

This confidence appears to have come from the fact that she is a woman of a certain age, and so, being the chauvinists that they are, they marked her down as somebody who could be bullied or persuaded into submission.

Remember, this is a man who somehow managed to talk or bully his wife into giving him an open power of attorney which he has been using for the last 11 years.

He probably believes he can talk women into doing anything for him.

In short, Adrian Delia, who only a couple of days ago blathered on about the need for more women in politics, tried to get his seat by removing one of the only few women in parliament and railroading or gaslighting her into doing his bidding, as he is wont to do. It didn't work.

Maria Deguara, precisely because she is a woman of a certain age, has probably encountered more than a few Delia types in her time, as have I. It is no coincidence that Delia is discovering, probably much to his bewilderment, that the most difficult and determined obstacles in his path come in the form of older women.

Right now, one of those problematic obstacles comes in the shape of Marlene Farrugia, who had to deal with Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando in an entirely different context (he was her husband), and that will have taught her some very important lessons about men like Adrian Delia.

Anybody who, like Michael Briguglio, tries to talk Marlene Farrugia into accommodating Delia has got to bear in mind that she has instantly recognised a certain unsavoury male personality type and is therefore better placed than most to see the risks involved and how best to handle them.

Instead of mocking her and trying to put pressure on her, the various apparatchiks of the Nationalist Party would do well to heed her warnings.

After all, she has been there and knows what she is talking about.