The news that the Labour Party has set up a programme to train women for politics and public life was met with unthinking praise from certain quarters. Meanwhile, I received a small flood of messages from women who were outraged and insulted. I didn’t need to ask why, because I had had the same reaction myself: “Oh, so women need training and men don’t.”

Well, exactly. People who have never been in politics or public life need training for it, whether they are men or women. It is ridiculous in the extreme to set up that programme only for women, and to restrict it to women. This is tantamount to saying that men can enter politics and public life straight off the street without any training for it – which is now being amply illustrated by Adrian Delia – while women have to be trained.

Both political parties are teeming with men who, despite having been involved in politics for many years, are clearly unfit for public life and don’t know how to handle it or where to draw the line. How about giving them some training, too? Then perhaps we will see fewer men who hold high public office or government consultancy roles, or who are failed party leadership contenders, making absolute asses of themselves on Facebook, behaving like teenagers or ranting and raving like lunatics, with all their psychiatric problems on display.

Train the new women, by all means, so that they don’t end up like the men we have to deal with now. But train the new men, too, so that they don’t meet the same fate either. And an even better idea would be to leave behind us, once and for all, the mentality of segregation by gender. Women and men are going to be in politics and public life together, so that’s how they should be trained: together.

Frank Portelli, the failed Nationalist Party leadership contender who shouldn’t have been on the list in the first place because of his personality problems and his massive financial baggage, only succeeded in mustering the support at the ballot of 10 councillors, one or two of whom are his sisters. The detachment from reality which made him think he could be elected and also fight a general election at the age of 80 has also prevented him from feeling any embarrassment about this, or any comprehension of the fact that it is a resounding rejection of him.

And so he carries on unperturbed, preaching from his mount and telling party members to vote for his nemesis, Adrian Delia. Except that the man isn’t really his nemesis at all, because the two have clearly been hatching a plot together. After a midnight summit meeting at a restaurant in Mellieha two days ago, where they were spotted by somebody who told me, Portelli spent the night texting and emailing all the party members who have a vote, having obtained this information by unclear means.

He has found no evidence of any wrong-doing by Adrian Delia, Portelli told the party members, and he has looked long and hard through the documents provided to him by Delia himself – the ones he said he couldn’t find when journalists asked him for them.

With the self-worshipping arrogance of his personality type, Portelli takes everyone else for a fool. When you investigate information, you don’t rely on what the culprit or suspect gives you, because he’s obviously not going to give you anything incriminating. Portelli hasn’t investigated anything at all. He can’t, because the information is not available to him. But that does not stop him duplicitously contacting all the party members he can, in Delia’s favour. Though I must say, I can’t see how a character reference or testimonial from Frank Portelli can ever help anyone’s cause or do them a favour.

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Chris Said has come out fighting, and good for him. The future of the Nationalist Party, the Opposition and democracy on this benighted island now rests on his shoulders and his ability to beat off the intruder from the Far Right who wishes to send the party spinning down a sink-hole of vile populism, far away from what it has been for the last 40 years since 1977. The ghastly populism that has had disastrous consequences in other, far larger countries than this microscopic archipelago is not something into which we should be rushing headlong, like crazed lemmings.