Last Tuesday, I presented a motion during the PN’s executive council for a vote on Adrian Delia’s leadership. The leader lost the vote and now, in my opinion, Delia should democratically call a vote of confidence in the general council or resign after two no confidence votes in his leadership by high party organs, in the space of a week.

I wish to share why I felt I had to take such a step. This was my initiative alone. I did not vote for Delia to become leader of the party but had canvassed for Chris Said because I thought Delia had a lot of unexplained baggage.

But after he won the election, I offered Delia my assistance as new party leader and this is what I have been doing for the last three years.

I spent a long time trying the keep the whole party working together until the next election, hoping things would naturally sort themselves out.

However, I was not happy at the way things were playing out. Delia made some serious mistakes in his deliberations, the first was when he failed to appoint Chris Said as deputy leader of the party to help in the process to unite the party.

The second big foul was when he asked former leader Simon Busuttil to leave the party. I was in London that day and I remember frantically posting on social media platforms that he should retract his mistake at once.

His general attitude to his MPs and other party members and councillors was rather shabby and made promises he failed to keep.

I kept getting messages from relatives and friends that they had decided not to vote PN anymore as long as Delia remained at the helm.

The fracas that occurred in the local councils and European Parliament elections last year led me to believe that we were on a downward spiral.

I often ended up writing messages on social media I was not convinced about at all.

I was always loyal to the PN party leaders, however, loyalty has its limits

But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and defended the party, until the news report emerged about the mobile phone messages to Yorgen Fenech, where I must say, he  defended himself very poorly.  What also worried me were the constantly low PN poll ratings, with Delia obtaining just 11 per cent in the latest one.

The PN was never a party which polled at 11 per cent but, at the current rate, we could soon be akin to one of the fringe parties.

At this rate, I wonder whether, in two years’ time, we would have enough votes to win even five seats in parliament!

However, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the vote two weeks ago, when two thirds of PN MPs forcefully voted on a motion which said that they had no confidence in Delia’s leadership. Among those who voted against him were some of his closest supporters. This was a watershed moment for me.

I thought he would now call a vote of confidence in the party structures to stamp his leadership credentials.

However, to my surprise, he plodded on as if nothing had happened. It was at this stage that I seriously started to wonder about the sanity of the whole scenario.

Here we are, a democratic party, with a leader who refuses to step down or call a confidence vote to ensure he stays at the helm. I thought about this for three days and immediately decided to put a vote of confidence in his leadership to the executive council meeting, which was due a week after.

No democratic party leader, anywhere in the world behaves like that after losing two thirds of the support of his parliamentary majority.

The situation was surreal. So last Tuesday, at the meeting of the party executive council, I presented my motion.

I was surprised how he tried to overlook it with excuses and shenanigans of every sort, misquoting the statute book, which did not say anywhere that I could not present such a motion. I put my foot down and the vote was finally held at 1.30am. The rest is history.

We are now threading on very thin ice. Delia should urgently call a meeting of the general council to confirm his leadership or resign.

There is no other way. As Lawrence Gonzi and Tonio Borg also advised him, he can also call a confirmatory vote by the party members too. There is no other way forward at all.

As Louis Galea pointedly told him after the vote, he should stop abusing of the good intentions of party members. I was always loyal to the PN party leaders, however, loyalty has its limits, and in my case, the limits have been surpassed with these two events.

Dr Michael Asciak, former PN MP