The move appears to have come late but maybe it is still on time.
The Nationalist Party, on Monday, entrusted a consultative ethics committee, headed by party stalwart Louis Galea, to look into allegations being made by blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia against leadership candidate Adrian Delia. It has two days to complete the job and come up with recommendations.
The first round of the leadership election has already started and will be completed on Saturday. The recommendations will come at the eleventh hour and the party will need to move fast if it is to be effective at all.
It has been a gruelling three months for the PN since the devastating electoral defeat in June. And, yet, it was not the drubbing itself that has been so damaging but the ramshackle state of the party and the internal disunity.
Leader Simon Busuttil rightfully resigned and laid out a programme that would lead to a successor, which is to include a final vote on the new leader by party members.
It was expected that people would step forward to fill Dr Busuttil’s shoes. Few did. None of the names bandied about as possible successors came forward. It appeared that the party had given up on the next election without a fight. It was a second huge disappointment to all those who gave the PN their vote in June.
The few that came forward spoke of party unity, of structures, of grassroots contact and of boosting the PN media but all missed the one big question: what can the party offer an electorate that has abandoned it in droves? It is an existential question and requires vision to answer.
The true newcomer on the block was Adrian Delia. His campaign was powerful and he is a good speaker. He appeared on the rise, until allegations emerged that money from a London prostitution racket was being channelled to a Jersey account he owned. He strongly denied the claims and sued for libel.
Ms Caruana Galizia’s often vitriolic pen has, for years, targeted the Labour Party but, this time, it was a PN leadership contestant. Her blogs on Dr Delia were like carpet bombing and his supporters saw her as the right-hand arm of the old PN guard they wanted to unsaddle. Suddenly, she became enemy.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat tried to ride the wave on Sunday and said he had faced very much the same as Dr Delia during the election campaign. The implication was that it was a Machiavellian fabrication, the work of a PN hidden hand.
Significantly, Dr Delia’s reactions were very much like those of the Labour leadership: libel suits, outright denials, explanations and talk of conspiracies. To some, Dr Delia began to sound suddenly very Labour. There began to emerge the prospect of the PN turning into a carbon copy of the Labour Party. Then, this week, the party administrative committee finally moved.
Clearly, the election of a new party leader has to be a democratic one and no one has a right to interfere in that process. But delegates and party members must be offered candidates who are seriously vetted and who have quality and vision. The party failed miserably there and maybe this week it finally started to make amends.