Labour’s delegates have voted against widening the leadership election to take in party members. Only the naïve, or those who have scant understanding of human nature, would be surprised. This is not to say that those who tried to push the vote through are either of those things, but at this stage, I really don’t know what they were thinking.

What we have here is a situation in which a select group of people with decision-making powers, which they safeguard zealously, have been asked to vote on sharing those powers with another 19,000 people. And of course, they used that vote to deliver a resounding No. No, we don’t want to share our toys. No, because being one of the select few who can determine the future of the Labour Party and thence, of the country, gives us a sense of importance. No, because we won’t feel that important if we’re one of 20,000 rather than one of 900. No, because you insulted us by saying that you don’t trust us to make the right choice. No, no, and no again.

Look at it clinically, and you’ll see that asking people to vote to share their powers and privileges is bound to get a negative result. From birth, people don’t like to share. The average toddler would rather see his toy car confiscated than be forced to share it with a little friend. It goes on through the different stages of life. That’s why the biblical story of Solomon threatening to divide the baby in half is so potent. That’s what it’s all about.

So 165 party delegates voted to share and 620 voted not to share. Some commentators have said that this is because they want to ensure that Joseph Muscat will become leader, and widening the electoral base to party members might bring in George Abela instead. I don’t think so. It’s a whole lot more primeval than that. The delegates are protecting their own interests and privileges. That’s all.

Somewhere in the course of the evening, I received a text message from a journalist friend there in the Labour arena where the big debate was going on: “I wish you were here. I feel like I’m in a theatre with a stand-up comedy act every 10 minutes.” Well, I didn’t wish I was there because my sense of humour tends to evaporate in these situations. I would have been aware every step of the way that this was how our potential prime minister was being chosen. Labour councillor Michael Cohen spoke to great applause. The party couldn’t possibly organise an election among 19,000 people in just 27 days, he said. I tend to agree with him there, given that the party couldn’t organise an election campaign or manifesto for an election for which it had had at least five years’ notice.

Somebody called Joe Fsadni stood up to say that delegates should vote against the motion lest they seem to be washing their hands of the responsibility for electing a decent leader, “like Pontius Pilate did with Jesus Christ.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. Lots of loud muttering later, they gave a standing ovation to the absent Alfred Sant, he who led them onwards and upwards to nothing and took 16 years to do it. But then, they were bound to applaud their own choice. The strongest argument against allowing delegates to choose a party leader is the reality of Sant, but when people are confronted with the stupidity of their own choices, they dig their heels in and become defensive.

The new Labour MP Marlene Pullicino put forward the motion in favour of widening the electoral base. The tone of her speech revealed that for the best part of the last 20 years she supported the Nationalist Party, switching to Labour only after the EU membership issue was decided (she voted in favour). By then, her marriage to Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had collapsed and she had set up home with another man, which fact has provoked a cynical response of religious inconsistency to her protestations, during an interview, that she will vote against divorce because she is a Catholic. Dr Pullicino revealed that she doesn’t really understand the mindset of a party she joined as a fairly recent convert. She still thinks like a Nationalist.

“When were Laburisti ever scared of change?” she asked her audience. Well, I’m sorry, but that would be for most of the last 30 years or so. The Labour Party has morphed into the most conservative political grouping in the country, beating the Nationalist Party which now remains conservative only in terms of conformity to the dominant religion, which is bad enough.

“The aim is to have a strong leader who will take us to victory and push the Nationalists out of government,” Dr Pullicino said. Ah, but here’s the thing. Her idea of a strong leader is the Nationalist idea of a strong leader, which is why she thinks that George Abela is the obvious choice by far, as I and thousands of others who are not Laburisti do. Dr Pullicino is thinking like a Nationalist – in other words, she is making an intelligent and pragmatic decision as to who is most likely to pull in the floaters and the doubters – and not like a Laburista iffissata, who doesn’t understand how The Others think. Marlene Pullicino knows exactly how The Others think, because she was one of them for a long time. “Use your minds and not your hearts,” she enjoined her audience – uselessly, as it turns out, because it all depends on what kind of minds we’re talking about here.

The resounding defeat of that motion, which is now linked in the public and party mind with George Abela – indeed, Dr Pullicino is one of his champions – tells us that Abela, like the motion, will be resoundingly defeated too. You can argue that he put himself to the vote before actually putting himself to the vote. What we had here was a test-run. The delegates were put out by his motion and they are put out by him.

Abela took a big risk with this one, but it doesn’t seem to have been a calculated risk. He didn’t stand any chance of pushing his motion through because people don’t vote to limit their powers and privileges, but to increase them or to stop them being shared or restricted. By pushing for this motion, he alienated the delegates by more or less saying that he doesn’t have confidence in their judgement. This means that they’re not exactly going to trip over themselves to vote for him now, no matter how hard he campaigns. So insisting on widening the electoral base to members never had the slightest chance of getting him that wider electorate he needed, and at the same time, it lost him the only electorate he was ever going to have.

Joseph Muscat can smirk all the way to 5 June, and the rest of us had better become accustomed to the sight of that self-satisfied face because we’re going to be seeing lots more of Alfred Sant Mark II, with the same mannerisms, the same verbal tics, and the same shirt-cuffs hanging halfway down the hand because the arms are too short or the sleeves are too long, and there appear to be no bespoke shirt-makers in Brussels. No. The Labour Party doesn’t like change.