Both main parties are not quite as cohesive as they’d like us to believe. The PN is giving Adrian Delia a platform nearly guaranteeing his re-election to Parliament and, should he have the wit to take it, an offer of a prominent seat in the next Parliament’s shadow cabinet. That presumes a defeat for the PN, but no large political party approaches a general election ruling out its re-election. It is likelier that Adrian Delia would see the point of an influential cabinet seat in a PN government.

This outreach is a display of unity. It is, at least one cannot doubt, intended to be perceived as such. Delia’s supporters, who remain disgruntled about what they perceive as the unfair treatment of their man, are being flattered and charmed into perceiving the PN as their party.

This flattery comes at a price. I heard it articulated quite flatly a few days ago by someone who wants Labour to lose for profoundly moral reasons but they shudder and shiver at the idea that their vote could make the guy who branded Daphne a “biċċa blogger” a minister of state.

The wound is deep.

Labour, on the other hand, is a veritable mess. As complicated relationships of parties with their former leaders go the acid reflux of the PN with Adrian Delia is a gentle kiss compared with the PL and the hairy monkey on its back called Joseph Muscat. Muscat is a veritable nightmare.

Former party leaders sometimes fail in their obligation to restrain the imposition of their views, often on policy, sometimes on conduct. Joseph Muscat does not merely inflict himself on Labour because, say, he thinks the party he used to lead should have a clearer position on abortion. He inflicts himself on Labour because he expects his former party to continue to guarantee his immunity from criminal prosecution.

An opinionated former leader who doesn’t know what retirement means is an embarrassment. A former leader who fully expects to enjoy the stash they pilfered before and after they resigned in disgrace as prime minister is a millstone on the bottom of the seabed tied to an all too short rope around the Party’s neck.

There is clearly mutual blackmail being exchanged between Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela and the threats they have for each other are material and life changing. They point each other to the inside of prison cells and that is bound to prevent people thinking clearly.

The real issue here is that Robert Abela and Joseph Muscat share a single support base, or at least they hold a bulk of it in common. They have a mutual dependence like Siamese twins joined at the hip but who hate each other to the point of wanting to stab each other at the cost of their own miserable political lives.

Most people in that support base do not yet or continue to refuse to recognise this impossible dichotomy. They find themselves happy to live with Robert Abela and Joseph Muscat as if they were branches of the same tree and they will go to the next election believing, like they did in 2017, that all the allegations and evidence of corruption is concocted by the evil Nationalists, the nasty Repubblika people, some Russian spy, some so-called journalists, and in any case people they can afford to ignore.

The tonic for Robert Abela’s campaigning problem is the pathological brevity of people’s memories. The poison for Robert Abela’s political future however is the inevitable denouement that postponed evidence of corruption brings about. He was there when Joseph Muscat walked down the steps of Castille for the last time as prime minister in 2019. Robert Abela knows that excrement may spray too far when it hits the fan. Eventually some of it hits your face.