And there goes the voter-cohort that Simon Busuttil/Forza Nazzjonali pulled in last June

I had a bit of a discussion yesterday with somebody who said that Delia is going to bring back all the lost votes. “What?” I said. “Do your sums. Before he starts making inroads into the gap between the parties as it stood last June, he’s going to have to work out how he’s going to find new votes to make up for all the ones that are going to stampede away from the Nationalist Party as soon as he is elected. And those votes are not coming back as long as he is leader, because they’re votes of conscience, and not the votes of political party fan-boys.”

Watching the Nationalist Party mass rallies on television last May, I saw crowds of young faces – older ones, too, but the younger ones were significant – who were completely absent from the mass rallies of 2013. They were from a cohort who vote on the basis of political ideology and principle, not political party fandom, who have expanded their lives beyond the island’s narrow horizons, whether for a few years or many, whether by actually leaving or simply wising up, and that is why it was so interesting to see them there.

Adrian Delia does not understand this sentiment. It is alien to him. And he has alienated these people and many others already. The sentiment is best expressed by Matthew Mizzi’s Facebook post below. And in all my 30 years of writing about politics, I can say with frankness that this is the first time I have ever heard people say, and so many of them at that, that the election of X as Nationalist Party leader will mean that they have to stop voting for the Nationalist Party, possibly for the first time in their lives.

Political fans don’t understand the mentality of people who think before they vote and who vote as a matter of conscience. They absolutely do not. They think in terms of party loyalty like a football club and their imagination does not go beyond that.

So why has it happened now? Precisely because Adrian Delia came in from the outside, and he came from the outside carrying heavy baggage. The people who stupidly pushed the notion that somebody from the outside is exactly what is required missed the point that political parties are like consumer brands: you know what to expect in terms of quality from anything sold to you under that brand.

But if somebody comes in from the outside to take over the top job and make the party his and in his own image, and the image is one of shady baggage and sleaze, then people who never bought into a brand like that are going to want out. Immediately. I’m one of them. To quote that other sleaze Robert Musumeci: #galiziabarra.

If I can’t vote for corruption and sleaze in the Labour Party, then I can’t vote for corruption and sleaze in the Nationalist Party either. I’m not a political fan-girl. I’m a public-spirited, educated and thinking person with a conscience.

I’ve seen enough harm done to my country and I’m not going to participate in further harm caused to it by a Nationalist Party led by a truly bad person like Adrian Delia and the criminals who surround him.