Look, you really don’t need an excuse for voting for anyone or anything. It’s perfectly all right to say “I like them”. That’s far more honest and acceptable than casting around for reasons to justify your choice. When you choose a girlfriend or a piece of furniture (not in the same category by any means, but I’m trying to illustrate a point here), do you feel the need to justify your choice? No. You choose anything/anyone because you like it/her/them, and for no other reason.

Demarco not only weighed down on Busuttil. Am I the only who thinks the connection between Labour and the Allied Group didn’t just evaporate after the Panama Papers?

Fenech Adami stayed on after defeat and won again after just two years. I’m not using this as an example of what Busuttil should do – just pointing out the obvious flaw in your argument.

And Alfred Sant almost won in 2008 – just 750 people got in the way of that.

In this case, Busuttil made no improvement on the previous election. I fear he can never defeat Muscat. Had he narrowed the defeat to 10,000 votes or less, I’d have advocated keeping him, but he made no inroads whatsoever, despite having caught the Castille gang with a smoking gun.

It’s true that it takes time to warm up to a new leader, but I’d sooner take the risk, provided a top candidate is found. This needs to be done without any rush. There’s no obvious successor, so the party needs to search far and wide. The right person can be found.

He managed to bring it to a stage where it could fight a decent electoral campaign. He will now have 5 years in which he can concentrate on preparing for the next election and not worry as much about the party itself. If the leader is changed now it is back to square 1!

So what were the counter-measures? The issue that worries me most is that either PN were totally unaware of the loss of votes or they knew and kept it hidden.

I suppose that’s what he meant when he said “Tista ma taqbilx maghna izda tista tahdem maghna”.