There you go: Jean Pierre and Kristy Debono have struck a deal with Adrian Delia

The story is here.

Jean Pierre Debono has been assistant secretary-general of the Nationalist Party for nine years, taking more than a quarter of a million euros in donations made to the party for his full-time salary. In return, he has done little more – by the accounts of party insiders – than further his own interests and ambition and those of his wife, Kristy.

The two are both members of parliament, Kristy having been a member if parliament also in the previous term, and her husband getting a seat for the first time last June.

This means that one of the two is going to give up his or her seat to allow Adrian Delia to be co-opted to parliament, without which he cannot take the Constitutional oath as Leader of the Opposition.

The deputy leadership post for Kristy Debono will not be the only part of the deal. Her husband will be replaced as assistant secretary-general in a few weeks, taking him off the Nationalist Party’s full-time payroll and leaving him financially dependent on his honorarium as a member of parliament. He will not like that. Given that Adrian Delia will be leader of the Opposition and not head of government, he will be unable to put Jean Pierre Debono on the state payroll, so the likelihood is that he will return him to the Nationalist Party payroll in a different position created for him, with a suitable salary from people’s donations.

And this, dear friends, is the real ‘klikka that has hijacked the PN’: you’re looking at it right there. Adrian Delia is planning his New Way on the back of somebody who has been assistant secretary-general for almost a decade, having entered that post from the party newsroom where he worked for years before that. Jean Pierre Debono is the real reason for much of the collapse in the efficiency of the Nationalist Party’s sectional committees and data collation. As assistant secretary-general, he was responsible for those very things – but he subordinated them to the furtherance of his and his wife’s narrow, personal ambition.

Those two are most definitely not team-players, which is going to be interesting, because neither is – notoriously – Adrian Delia.