We all thought the scenes of the past would not be repeated this time.
But once again we have the sorry spectacle of PN delegates tearing each other apart as the party prepares for yet another leader election.
The Labour media is having a field day. All it has to do is tap in onto the various discussions, if one can call them that, on the social media and identify the participants.
The delegates are claiming one of the candidates acted in bad faith - first promising support and allegiance and then going back, it would appear, on his word.
This opened the floodgates as the past was relentlessly rehashed.
The party had been warned, by among others, Rainer Fsadni and Ivan J Bartolo, but in its wisdom chose to hold the leadership contest first.
It was pointed out that in the past the party had sometimes chosen to hold a general wide discussion on principles first followed then, and only then, by the leadership contest.
The race has now been declared open, with the results we can see.
As I see it, the party does not have elder statesmen, with no ties to the principal contenders, and with no skeletons in the cupboards, who can give disinterested advice to the party base.
On the contrary, if I know anything of the Maltese scene, such elder statesmen would only be surrounded by clamour urging them on the way out, such is the greed to take their seats.
The scenes last Sunday of the delegates filling the Dar Centrali with such rapt attention should not hide the fact that in so many kazini, local councils and even constituency structures, the party still clings on to jaded, tired people well beyond their sell by date.
These people are, perhaps unconsciously, blocking the way for the new volunteers.
And the party is still labouring under a huge load of debts: it has to keep having days of fundraising marathons etc. People are tired now.
On the other hand the party faces an arrogant Robert Abela whose weapon of choice when facing the problems of the country is to ratchet up intransigence and hang the consequences.
There are so many things going wrong and the pig-headed government persists with its wrong solutions and, worse, with the wrong people.
Cultural note
1591 narrative of the Siege of Malta
Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali was born in 1541 and was 24 years old in the year of the Siege.
This text was written between 1591 and 1599 from information provided by participants in the siege and who were known to the author.
This work is not an "official history" as Gelibolulu was not an official Ottoman historian but he obtained information from participants in the siege, moving in high Ottoman circles, at times attached to the well-connected Bosnian Vizier, Lala Mustafa Pasha (c.1500-1580) who in 1580 was for three months Ottoman Grand Vizier.
Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, poet, calligrapher and state official, truly a man of the pen, served in an official capacity in Aleppo, Damascus, Egypt, Istanbul, Bosnia, Erzurum, Baghdad, Sivas and in Jiddi where he died in 1600.
(Ed. M Camilleri Besieged Malta 1565, vol II 2015)
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