For the Nationalist Party, this is turning out to be a summer of successive crises.

Although the party leadership still goes on as if nothing is happening, and the government still sails on, the battle for the party’s soul has now been engaged.

These past hours the focus has been on Cyrus Engerer’s move from PN to PL. The sheer homophobic bile in many comments on Facebook and other comment walls has to be read to be believed.

Mixed with this there was the anger and vituperation at someone who crossed over to the other side, the turncoat who betrayed the party in which he militated – an altogether different kind of rage.

But this was not the main event of the week. Far more important was the vote on the Second Reading of the Divorce Bill on Wednesday in which only 12 MPs, including most of the Cabinet, backed Dr Gonzi’s No vote and the same amount - 12 - voted Yes including a minister and two parliamentary secretaries and 11 abstained, including two ministers, and two parliamentary secretaries.

This, in my opinion, was a far more serious vote of No Confidence in the Prime Minister than has been realised.

Last week, I argued that the Prime Minister must ask whether he is backed by his party, or go. Predictably, also considering his personal make up and background, he did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he kept going as if nothing was the matter.

He met the Air Malta pilots’ association, visited countless places and kept going with his appointments as if everything was calm and smooth and there was no turmoil around him.

Even though he did not ask for a vote of confidence, he got one, and it turned out bad for him. Wednesday’s vote can also be interpreted to say that mainly it is the Cabinet around him that is most loyal to his point of view, and even so, one minister voted Yes and two ministers abstained. Only one parliamentary secretary followed him and two abstained while another two voted Yes.

Apart from this institutional loyalty (not to say Cabinet solidarity), the backbenchers who voted No were people who had amply made their opinions known – no surprises there.

Now it cannot be argued that these 13 are the only representatives of the PN soul. If that were the case, where does that put the other 12 and the other 11?

Wednesday’s vote has blown to bits the spin manufactured around the last General Council that the party is an inclusive one. Unless, that is, one means by inclusive that it includes three conflicting opinions.

I am not saying anything new here: we have been seeing, in this divorce issue, the three strands in the party – the integralist strand, the liberal strand and the don’t know strand.

Where last March only JPO and Jesmond Mugliett had the guts to stand and defy the party discipline, this time 23 did, in various degrees.

Cyrus Engerer going in a red T-shirt to PN headquarters to register his resignation showed not spunk but foolish bravado. Had he felt strongly for a liberal kind of party he should have stayed there and soldiered on, especially now that the people who feel like him are on the increase and not afraid of challenging the party leader.

His move to PL shows immaturity, not merely bravado. Unless the two parties are exactly the same, which they are not, they can never be interchangeable. Besides, politics is not crossing over to the other side as soon as your side disappoints you, but staying inside it and acting to change it from within. The Cyrus Engerer who crossed over to PL is, or will soon become, a problem for that party as well.

Following my article last Sunday in which I invited Dr Gonzi to consider doing what Berlusconi has said he will do – stay in office until 2013 but not beyond – I received many calls from people well inside the PN camp who agreed with what I had written. I did not receive one single negative comment.

On Wednesday, when I went to Parliament to see the divorce vote, I was further reassured my comments were what many people, specifically MPs, were thinking.

Even so, I was surprised by the extent of the vote.

Can we, can anyone, consider that vote to be a mere accident? In parliamentary procedure there has to be a money vote which the government loses to be considered as a vote of no confidence. In 1998, Alfred Sant lost the government when he declared that he would consider a vote on the Vittoriosa waterfront as a vote of confidence and Dom Mintoff, having gone too far in his stance to withdraw (and also having calculated that John Dalli would be held up in Libya and not return in time for the vote) voted against and the government fell.

Wednesday’s vote was on a matter of far more substance than on the restoration of a historic quay. Having declared a free vote does not really change matters for Dr Gonzi had made it amply clear that his position and that of the party was against divorce.

One can sneer for all one’s worth at the PL’s near-unanimity (even if in the case of both Adrian Vassallo and Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, it would not seem that their isolated position did not bring them in conflict with the party’s base – Dr Coleiro Preca herself said she had been stopped by people who asked her if she had by any chance become a Nationalist) but there is no indication of the same ideological split that happened in the PN ranks.

PN’s problem is no one is in a position to challenge Dr Gonzi’s leadership. There are many aspirants, but frankly none have the sheer experience, the feel one gets from the heart of the party, that Dr Gonzi has. It took Eddie Fenech Adami a painful three years from 1978 to 1981 to make his mark as a party leader, to remove Dr Borg Olivier’s loyals and to mould the party in his image. The only way he could do it was from Opposition. As it turned out to be, it was an Opposition whose members, including Dr Fenech Adami’s own family and wife, suffered at the hands of Labour violence. Solidarity under such stress unified the party far more than anything else.

Today, the situation is very different. The party is in government but seems to have lost its vision where it wants to go and where it wants to take the country. The comments on Dr Gonzi’s vote on Wednesday, and also on Cyrus Engerer’s defection show a rump of a party that wants the party to, as they put it, get cleaned, that wants it to remain firm (or return) to a Christian ideology even if this is not popular. But as the parliamentary vote showed, that is the feeling of only a rump of the parliamentary group. The others think differently – some are liberals (and the party’s tradition is definitely liberal, not church- or clerical-led) while others are extremely sceptical about the way in which the government is administering the country.

Can the party sort itself out while still in power? Historically, it would seem this cannot be done: so it will either have to be the party has to endure a defeat and spend years in the desert or else the party is doomed to remain in its present format and fight the election with such splits, with a party leader who is not sure he commands the respect and support of the party rank and file, and without finding out what is the party’s offer to the country, except, that is, of keeping Joe Muscat and his PL, out.

Meanwhile, the government continues to face problems. The Arriva debacle has not gone away. The company itself has proved to be a bad planner and does not have adequate crisis management. But the fact itself that the government is now urging changes to the pre-set routes (which were laid down by the government through Transport Malta) is an admission in not so many words that someone is realizing those plans (especially those involving long detours and this maddening interchange system) were not suited in the first place. It may well be true that consultation was held and no one reacted, least of all the councils now up in arms, (something that happens all the time) but a careful administration would have never gone for the Big Bang shebang on such a crucial issue which impacts on people going to work.

Even so, in those cases where the Arriva system is now up and running, the ride is pleasant and the frequency right. However, not many people seem to have experienced this so far.

The government, whatever the internal crises, continued going through the motions.

On Monday, I was very surprised to have glimpsed Minister Tonio Fenech at the Mary Fenech Adami funeral in Birkirkara, knowing there was a eurogroup meeting that same day. The Financial Times Brussels blog had just run a story that Poland had asked to be present at the meeting as current EU president, but was not allowed to.

Somehow, Mr Fenech made it to the Euro group which kept meeting till very late on Monday and he also attended the ECOFIN meeting on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was in Parliament registering his (rather surprising) abstention. Then he and the prime minister met the Air Malta pilots.

When he spoke to the Maltese media via a video-conference, all he seemed to speak about was Italy’s problems, I hope that Labour will force him to speak far more clearly about the Malta position on the various issues at stake in the parliamentary debate on the matter this Tuesday. Though I cannot really understand why PL is letting the government off so lightly by going for a non-vote debate.

Air Malta: we only have the pilots’ association’s word that they are convinced the prime minister will do all in his power to save Air Malta the way the pilots want it. There has been no such statement from Castille. And frankly the situation has been getting postponed from November to December, then to May, now ad infinitum or maybe the end of the summer season to start seeing results or changes. Who is going to decide? Management or the pilots?

Meanwhile the country tries to stay out of the sweltering searing heat, hoping that Boiler 7 does not play up to its usual summer frolic (well, think of Cyprus now condemned to a two hour on, two hour off electricity supply because one power station went up in smoke in the weapons explosion that killed 12). Parts of the government system, you see, do work, but others (such as keeping road markings visible at all times, ensuring the roads are safe, and delivering what one would think are the normal expected results of public service, including a hospital that really works where patients are not lumped together in a Dantesque circle of hell emergency ward) very manifestly do not.

Anyone in Dr Gonzi’s place would ask himself why bother to remain on top, hated by many, vituperated most of the time, shut up in the Castille fortress with everyone forecasting a certain defeat and no hope on earth of redressing the matter. Anyone, that is, except the man himself. That’s his DNA and we all know where he got it from.

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