Zero strategy: Delia hasn’t understood that the people he’s ripping to shreds will be his MPs if he is leader

Adrian Delia has spent the last couple of weeks, since the story broke about his money-laundering for a London prostitution racket, ripping into everyone left, right and centre.

He’s been going nuts, drumming up the vote by tearing the present party leader to shreds along with members of the administrative council, various members of parliament and others.

Somebody who knows him well told me recently that the man is a good talker – the kind you send into the courtroom to blather on – but has no sense of strategy at all. He quite obviously does not, because the people he is railing against so nastily now are include members of what will be his Opposition – his own MPs if he gets to be their leader.

He is also bitching about and venting against people whom he absolutely requires if he is to manage the party structure. Instead, he is alienating them wholesale. Fabulous leadership skills, I must say. Truly amazing political skills, too.

Muscat started out by bringing all the old rubbish on board to get them behind him, even dead wood which his predecessor Alfred Sant had lopped off. Delia is doing the opposite: before he has even become leader, he is lashing out at and alienating people who actually are in the party and on what will be his side of the House, already.

As I tend to say, you can always, but always, tell when people have never worked in organisations, never been in the army, and never, at the very least, did group work at school. Always. You can even tell whether somebody who was one of many siblings operated with them as a group or was permitted by parents to dominate them as the special one.