On Thursday, 900 or so delegates will vote to choose a new leader of the Labour Party. Some will do so on the basis of what they have felt since the contest began.
Others will arrive at their decision after kicking off with an open mind, having digested the projections and pledges of the contestants, as well as their style. The delegates are sovereign in their decision. Efforts by the candidate to influence them positively and win their trust constitute the key factor in the leadership race.
There were other factors in force. In particular, the MLP's abiding adversary, the Nationalist Party, has been playing a clever game. Its basic aim is to try to bring about an outcome that will be advantageous to it. In the sense that the new leader will be the relatively least difficult to beat when the next general election is called. Clear though that may be, the strategy is not obvious to everyone, including to some Labour delegates.
The Nationalist spin will succeed to the extent that they confuse them with the tactics being used to try to bring their strategy to a successful end. Politics is not a game created by gentlemen for gentlemen. It is a blood sport. The winner takes all. That is particularly so at the level of the parties. Like two boxers who touch gloves at the start of their fight, parties do not wish each other well, and may the best side win. Their intention is to maul the other side.
The massive exposure that the PN media has been giving to the contestants was not intended to help them. Rather, it had two aims. One was to make sure that it promotes the PN agenda, to influence an outcome where the winner would be the one Nationalist strategists think they can beat in the general election. The other was to exploit to the hilt the division and confusion that reigns within the Labour Party. Thereby the PN hope that they will see the MLP bloodied and weakened further for a long time, and that whoever wins will have a Herculean task to heal the party and set it to rights.
Few can argue that the PN, having been handed three victories on the trot in so many successive general elections since 1998, have had a fresh field day. That was ensured, in particular, by what the wise people tasked to examine why Labour lost again in March were forced to point out.
The main turbulence which arose within the MLP as a result of that report related to its reference to one deputy leader and the head of the electoral office, both of whom it named, and what it implied about another senior officer, very obviously the general secretary, whom it did not name. Yet the essence of the report was not that. It was that Labour had become a loser not least because it ignored the report analysing why it had lost in 2003, it was riven by cliques, it had a sorry lack of leadership, which ended up not even persuading some 7,300 known Labour voters to trust them with their vote. It pathetically did not manage to make headway among the 32,000+ new voters who came on stream between 2003 and 2008. The defeat analysts identified other structural failures. At this stage of the campaign rational MLP delegates will be asking themselves key questions on the basis of their bitterness at seeing their party lose another election, and their deep anger over what was revealed by the 2008 defeat report, the essence of which - discredited weak leadership - they were well aware of, anyway. The questions will go something like this:
How could it be that the magnitude of the long decline and deep mess of the MLP was not noted, at least by the leadership, well before the general election?
What can be done to avoid a repetition and to get the party back on an even keel?
Who has the guts and the standing to chop off the dead and rotting wood and nurse Labour back to health, doing away with factions once and for all, tuning and mobilising the party into a serious and effective electoral machine which never forgets that the individual and social justice should be at the heart of all social democratic action?
Who can work out a programme to pay off the party's debts so that it would not be hampered by the threat of financial bankruptcy, which in political terms often leads to, or accelerates the fall into moral bankruptcy?
Who can mobilise all the various layers of the party into a coherent whole which speaks its mind freely in order to develop ideas and proposals, and not to degenerate again into another tower of Babel?
Who can do so while ensuring that the party media inform objectively what is going on and then help intelligently to promote the MLP's evolving policies? Who can attract and mould strong talent to help do all that, and further talent across many disciplines to help develop the party into the alternative government?
Who can gradually persuade a majority of new voters and uncommitted people that the Labour Party has achieved the leap towards positive quality and depth to enable it to challenge at the next election on the strength on what it has to offer?
Who can demonstrate that it is possible to make sensible economic proposals, always linked to social justice, that allow full personal initiative to exploit the opportunities that exist in any situation, along with the threats which always have to be handled as well as one can?
Who can be trusted to attempt to do all that with a good chance of success? In short, who stands the best chance of breaking the deadly electoral trend and leading the Labour Party towards a democratic majority, at long last?
Rational delegates may have more questions to ask. They have a historic opportunity to get it right. They have a heavy responsibility. The election of a leader is not an everyday affair. Far less so that of a successful one.