Deborah Schembri has confirmed on Xarabank that she will be standing for election on the Labour ticket in 2013. Joseph Muscat was right to snap her up. He’ll probably field her on two of these districts − 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th − where the divorce vote was strongest and where disillusionment with the Nationalist Party is greatest.

And then the Nationalists run the risk of being hoist by their own petard. They’d better start some strategic planning as to who exactly they’re going to field on those districts. Poor Cyrus Engerer and Karl Gouder can’t be cut up and spliced into enough parts to cover the lot − but that’s how bad it’s got. There are precious few others who appeal to Sliema types, on the Nationalist Party list.

The Nationalist Party is against divorce, but when it wants to project a contemporary image, it sends out the only openly gay politicians in the country − who, ironically, stand on its ticket − to speak in favour of divorce and gay marriage. How’s that, for mixed messages. This isn’t the coalition of liberal and conservative politics that Mario de Marco (also popular with Sliema types, incidentally) described in his piece for The Times. No, that’s chaotic thinking.

Schembri would have been a good candidate for the Nationalist Party − assuming those are her politics − but it’s not like she could stand on their ticket, or they could even ask her, after they fought her all the way and tried to mobilise the electorate to vote against what she stands for. So now Labour’s got her.

The more I think about it, the more it bites home just how crazy and stupid it was for the Nationalist Party to take a position against divorce when the vast majority of its supporters in the crucial 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th districts are in favour and were largely responsible for returning the Yes result in the referendum. It isn’t possible that the party pollsters didn’t pick that up, because you could pick it up just by talking to people and that’s what MPs are supposed to be for, with their surgeries and their constituencies. Even elderly people in ‘Sliema’ – a metaphor for a whole area and an entire type − are for divorce. The assumption that because you are elderly then you are super-religious and against divorce is wrong where ‘Sliema’ is concerned.

I agree that the Nationalist Party should have taken a position, but I was clear in my mind that the position should have been YES. This is because it made no sense at all to be at odds with the tens of thousands of PN supporters in crucial districts who were definitely going to vote YES and in fact, did so. Those are the people, unlike the ones in, say, Mosta, on whom each and every election depends. They are the Nationalist Party’s kingmakers.

The Nationalist Party cannot say, either, “Oh look how many of our supporters voted No so we would have alienated them by taking a position for divorce legislation.” The party has no way of knowing whether its instruction to electors to vote No did not in fact shape, and quite considerably, the No vote. Certain sorts of electors are more likely to take guidance on how to vote from their political party than from the Catholic Church. We have an in-built resistance to being bossed about by priests, which we resent, but take being bossed about by politicians for granted. We even like it. There’s a pretty strong likelihood that if the Nationalist Party had instructed its supporters to vote Yes, then the No vote would have been even weaker. If the party bosses don’t admit to that, what they are saying is that they have no influence at all on their own electors.

If the Nationalist Party couldn’t take a position for divorce legislation, then it should have taken no position at all. That wouldn’t have been ideal − it made the Labour Party look wishy-washy - but it would have been a whole lot better than the self-inflicted crisis that is the direct result of the position it did take.

A position against divorce is not just a position against divorce. It’s a ruddy great label that says you live in another century and are authoritarian and paternalistic, that you want to control what others do and that you even think that what they do is somehow your business. The sad perversity of it all is that the Nationalist Party isn’t any of this in every other respect. That more accurately describes Labour, which blighted this country by deploying those very negative characteristics. The Nationalist Party has been marked consistently by its forward-looking policies and its centre-left politics. It is hard to reconcile the fact that the party which campaigned for EU membership and took us into the eurozone is the very same one that thinks of divorce legislation as some kind of ‘babaw’.

What a waste this has all been. Honestly, what a waste − and all because a few individuals wanted to keep their finger in the dyke (that sounds rude but it isn’t, I promise) for another few years. You know, stave off the inevitable for a little while longer, even if people don’t want you to and you’re committing political suicide.

Of course, by snapping up Deborah Schembri, the Labour Party will be able to take ownership, in public perception at least, of the divorce referendum Yes campaign − you know, the successful ones. And it won’t matter that it was actually a Nationalist MP who did it, because guess what, his party took a position against.

I didn’t need the 20-20 vision of hindsight to see this coming − if the referendum had returned a No result the anger and irritation on my ‘home turf’ districts would have been a thousand times worse than it is now as we watch the Nationalists dither and draw straws to see who will be allowed to use his conscience and vote No or sit out the vote in the parliament bar.

Why are we most angry at the Nationalists, when Labour are doing pretty much the same thing? Simple – it’s the people we vote for who concern us most. It’s not like we’re not accustomed to Labour behaving badly. That’s why we don’t vote for them.

It looks like what we were dealing with here, in that part of the Nationalist Party which takes decisions about such matters, was a homogenous group of men from practically identical school/family/religious backgrounds who ended up talking to each other and being completely unaware that they are only... talking to each other. They actually thought that because theirs was the majority (the only?) opinion in the room then it was the majority opinion in the country and certainly among Nationalists.

When you surround yourself with people who think exactly as you do, you end up thinking that you’re right all the time, even when it is so very obvious to others that you are heading at 100mph for a concrete wall.

There, I’ve got that one off my chest for now.