The Nationalist Party biggest task at hand is to make itself seem electable: to make people believe that it can be an alternate government to the Labour Party's administration.

Political surveys - including one last weekend - have consistently showed that it is struggling to do so.  A MaltaToday survey last Sunday showed that the PL leads the PN by around 24,000 votes and that PN leader Bernard Grech remains significantly less trusted than his PL counterpart Robert Abela.

The people are not buying that the PN can govern - and perhaps that's because the PN is its own worst enemy.

The latest proof of this is the almighty fuss that was caused by an opinion piece penned in the The Malta Independent on Sunday by Kevin Cassar - a former PN election candidate.  In his piece, Cassar described PN MP Alex Borg as "Labour's Trojan Horse", and criticised the Gozitan for his comments on fellow PN MP Karol Aquilina and US President Donald Trump.

Borg himself penned a response on social media disagreeing with the notions put forward by Cassar in his article - as is his right to do, and as he should do if he felt aggrieved by it.

But the article was met by the PN's MPs all falling over themselves to defend Borg and criticised Cassar, labelling his article as a "senseless attack." 

No sooner had the defence been mounted, that the PL launched the offence: the PN was once again divided, one 'faction' was again launching attacks against the other, how can they govern when they can't even agree between themselves - it's an age old narrative that the PN has not been able to rid itself of, and many people out there believe it irrespective of whether it's true or not.

Without entering into the merits or otherwise of what Cassar wrote - yes, Alex Borg has every right to make his own statement and rebut whatever was written about him; but is a whole public show from pretty much every PN MP really necessary?

Kevin Cassar is a former PN electoral candidate but he hasn't been a part of the party since 2017 - now 8 years ago.  Nowadays in the public eye, he is a simple opinionist.  Is it really necessary for a whole political party to mobilise against an opinionist?

When Cassar had left the PN In 2017, one of the things he had said was that the PN had "moved closer to a cult-like situation, where critiques are rebuked with personal attacks."  The parallels between that statement then and this case are quite clear.

Contrast this with a similar situation within the Labour Party.  Neville Gafa - another opinionist but with his own website - has in recent weeks written article after article criticising government minister Roderick Galdes.

Since 5 March in fact, Gafa has written no less than 38 articles centred on Galdes - criticising him initially for appointing a lawyer affiliated to former PN leader Simon Busuttil to a government position, but then moving on to writing about everything from the Housing Authority to Galdes going on Andrew Azzopardi's radio station to Galdes apparently having a penchant for travelling to Sicily.

Lest we forget that Neville Gafa himself is a former government official from the times of the Joseph Muscat administration - it's not like he is somehow affiliated to anything against the government.

Yet this incessant critique from someone perceived to be within the PL circles goes largely ignored - left to live an existence on a website which has limited viewership.

But faced with one article criticising an MP, those in the PN felt the need to mobilise and make a big deal of an opinion piece, sending it to the national headlines - and because many still start from the pre-conceived notion that there are divisions within the PN, then the grandstanding is just seen as more proof of those notions, and more so that the PN may not be ready to accept the inevitable criticism it would get if it is trusted to be in government.