The signs of desperation emanating from the Ranil Wickremesinghe camp in the UNP are becoming way too obvious. In the past week, rather than focusing on naming the party's nominee for the presidential poll, which has already been fixed for 16 November, they occupied themselves with the task of preventing the election from taking place in the first place, in a desperate bid to overcome the nominee issue. As a result, Wickremesinghe has had to endure humiliation at the hands of his own Cabinet which refused to consider the abolition of the executive presidency on the pretext that the next election had already been called. With egg on his face, Wickremesinghe tried the next best thing by pushing the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to "question" Gotabaya Rajapaksa over alleged electoral fraud at the last presidential election. The charge was that Rajapaksa had campaigned for his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa while on a tourist visa, but the Colombo Chief Magistrate refused to give the order and that attempt too ended in failure. Wickremesinghe is fast running out of both time as well as options with the 7 October deadline for submitting nominations now just two weeks away. Although the deposit payment had been made on behalf of Gotabaya Rajapaksa to the Election Commission (EC), there are still some questions over his eligibility to contest due to the ongoing probe on his dual citizenship carried out by the CID. However, if by any chance Wickremesinghe's special cabinet operation to seek approval to abolish the presidency was a strategic move to achieve other goals in order to decimate Premadasa, then he must surely be smiling to himself. For instance, the move has succeeded in effectively driving a wedge between the Premadasa camp and, kingmaker in waiting, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which has frowned on Premadasa's opposition to the proposal. This in itself is a spectacular success for Wickremesinghe as the TNA has now been given the license to back him on the premise of eventually abolishing the post. If the TNA needed justification for such support, it has now been given to them by none other than Premadasa. A masterstroke if ever there was one, Wickremesinghe has succeeded in bartering the egg he got on his face from his own Cabinet for electoral support from the TNA which is strongly agitating for the abolition of the presidency. If the TNA were to now publicly announce its support for Wickremesinghe as the UNP's presidential nominee, it will no doubt put the Premadasa camp in a delicate situation, knowing well that even if they succeed with the party nomination, electoral success may not be that promising in the absence of Tamil support. By his outright refusal to consider the abolition proposal, Premadasa may well find himself on tricky ground as the issue still holds much currency with every single president in the last 25 years having been elected on the promise of abolishing the presidency. The recent arbitrary actions of the current President, even with his wings clipped by the 19th Amendment, such as to sack the Government and place whatever institutions under his wing, have helped to keep the subject of abolition current and are still very much hot topics on the election agenda. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and Maithripala Sirisena were all elected on the single most important promise of discarding the presidency after their respective tenure but as history would have it, except for Sirisena, who now can at least claim to have made an attempt to abolish it at last week's Cabinet meeting, the other two simply enjoyed the enormous power of the post till the last with little or no attempts to keep their promise. Mahinda Rajapaksa in fact went one step further by actually changing the Constitution to enable him to rule for life. The only thing that prevented him from doing so was Sirisena's election to the post in 2015. Given these dynamics, Wickremesinghe may well have lost the battle in Cabinet but certainly not the war. While this cat and mouse game goes on in the UNP, social media, which is likely to play a decisive role in election campaigning, has been going to town at Wickremesinghe's expense with messages to the effect that the UNP will name its nominee in December, long after the election. Be that as it may, what Party Leader Wickremesinghe is currently doing or not doing for that matter is akin to Nero fiddling while Rome was burning. For all intents and purposes, the UNP is burning and those feeding the fire are none other than the Party Leader and his Deputy. With neither of them willing to budge, the fate that will befall the grand old party at the hands of those who are supposed to safeguard its best interests is indeed sad. The party, if it is to survive, needs desperately to be saved from its current leaders, who have shown time and again that their self-interest supersedes party interest. Wickremesinghe, by delaying to name the candidate for reasons best known to himself, and Premadasa, announcing himself as the candidate without following party protocol, have both done wrong and these two wrongs don't make a right. Premadasa meanwhile continues to stumble with the latest episode being his presence at the Presidential Export Awards last week alongside President Maithripala Sirisena. Many eyebrows were raised as to his presence at the event because exports are not a subject that comes under his purview. Given the hostility between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe, Premadasa's presence beside Sirisena has fuelled the rumour mill which is now speculating whether Premadasa gave away much more than just presidential awards. Be that as it may, the week ahead will decide or seal the fate of the grand old party and by extension the outcome of the upcoming presidential election as well. Desperate times will most certainly result in desperate measures and how these events will shape the political destiny of the country, only time will tell.