This must have been the worst week in the long history of the Nationalist Party which, coming from two consecutive historic defeats, is imploding. Its leader is under siege by his own backbenchers who, however, seem loath to declare themselves free from the party whip and thus remove the leader from the constitutional post of Leader of the Opposition.

The leader is under attack – in repeated meetings, by leaks and hints. Coming out from such long and hot meetings, he declares to the waiting media that all is well with the Party when the media would know, from leaks from the meeting itself, that blood was shed upstairs.

This is but one sorry aspect: he lies and gets caught out. A former business associate claims he has lied on the matter of the Soho brothel.

During the campaign, the leader accumulted miles and miles of door-stepping but his speeches became predictable, especially when he added abortion to his spurious claims. In the end, all his efforts came to naught and the Party suffered a historic defeat in the European Parliament election and an even bigger one in the local council election.

Now his opponents are circling around him, picking off his aides one by one. The first one to fall was Pierre Portelli, possibly the man who hit the casting key and chose him from relative anonymity to become leader – the king-maker, in other words. The others – Clyde Puli, above all others – are under siege but they are elected members, whereas Pierre was just chosen.

Even Adrian Delia was elected, through Simon Busuttil’s lasting contribution to the Party, by the Party’s rank and file (much as is happening in the British Conservative Party). Delia is right when he says only those who put him there can remove him, although a leader who has suffered two huge defeats would probably ask for a vote of confidence.

What shocked the country was the amount of bile this stalemate has revealed. We only know what is public but all signs point to a far worse state of affairs below sea level. Take Portelli’s reported remarks: he wants to clean the party. Those on the other side want to do the same, but in the opposite direction. There is no searching for a common ground.

The impression one gets is that having been together for such a long time, mostly in government, each one is well aware of what all the others have done and where the skeletons lie, and all they’re doing is throwing skeletons at each other. Now when they finally get tired of all this civil war, with nobody the winner and everybody the loser, they may finally get to their senses and start reasoning.

First: there is no way one side can win.

Secondly: all this fighting is unseemly and is offering the party in government much cause of mirth and enjoyment.

Thirdly: the PN is a very broad church, hardly like the regimented PL made strong by all those years in Opposition.

In May’s double elections, the PN got plus or minus some 100,000 votes. Less – far less – than Labour’s but 100,000 nevertheless: people who have always voted PN and who will never switch.

There were also another 100,000 who did not bother to vote and a fair number of these would have voted PN if the circumstances had been right, had Delia waged a different campaign, had those against him toed the party line.

I do not think Delia will go and the way he was chosen shows how the system is wrong. The party has been turned into a pyramid where the leader is all and everything depends on him, much like the system we so criticise with the Prime Minister on top of everything, an elected absolute monarch. The Leader of the Opposition is another elected absolute monarch, and if he says he wants to stay on, there is no way of getting him out.

But this is the best time for the PN to come up with a correction, and maybe save the nation as well. The PN must give itself a collective leadership, much as happened when George Borg Olivier was persuaded to stand down. The collective leadership – Eddie, Guido, Censu, Ugo – provided the basis for the future governments led by Eddie.

The party as a whole, not just one section of it, must keep up the good fight against corruption in high places. So too the party must keep the government on its toes.

Meanwhile, with Portelli out of the picture, the party must shake up its media, which has just seen its listenership dwindle to below Radju Marija, its TV station still in the fourth place (a very bad fourth) and its papers and online platform doing as badly.

The party is throwing good money after bad to keep the media afloat and this is haemhorraging the party’s finances. The only solution – and, believe me, I have been around and there is no other way – is to let them sink or swim, and cut the umbilical cord that makes the party feel it is obliged to have all this media.

Even if Delia were to go now, there is no time to change the party before the next general election, as Joe Saliba is reported to have said.

But there is still a target that may be attainable: go local. In the local council elections, the PN lost control of councils that had been PN for many years. Had the party persuaded more PN voters to turn up, maybe these councils would not have been lost.

Anywhere I look, I see a dearth of new candidates, of young people, of fresh energies. And I see a surplus of old and tired candidates who did not make way for new blood. If there is a culprit for this defeat, it lies squarely at the door of the party’s central machine that seems more interested in kicking people out than in bringing people in.

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