It was a deadly boring session in Parliament last Tuesday. The House was discussing the Mepa demerger bills at committee stage in plenary, which meant that the members (or those who bothered to follow) had to go through the text clause by clause.

There were frequent interruptions - many times the Minister (Leo Brincat) needed to consult his advisers and this meant the session had to be interrupted, again and again.

On the Opposition side there was Marthese Portelli who was making a good job of it. I do not always agree with what she says and how she says it, but she was keen and aggressive, very logical in her interventions and with sharp logic bringing down the government's proposals. I don't think this area is what she would want to cover but she was doing a very good job of it and showed familiarity with the details.

And there was Marlene Farrugia, rather timid at first, but getting bolder by the minute.

Given the boredom that permeated the session, I did not pay much attention at first but then I noticed that Ms Farrugia kept repeating, over and over again: "the Labour Party who until today I support". Even then the penny did not drop until the Opposition called for a vote and Ms Farrugia, in a declaration of vote, announced that she was about to vote against the government.

That was the moment when we found out that, meanwhile, she had written - by hand, on parliamentary notepaper - a letter to the Prime Minister advising him that she had left the Labour party.

I for one did not see this one coming, nor did many of those around me. The Opposition, and Ms Farrugia, had wanted the government to allow the eNGOs to submit three names for the Environment Committee but the government, through Minister Leo Brincat, very politely but nonetheless adamantly, kept refusing.

That was the straw that broke Ms Farrugia's back. She did what she did. It was not premeditated or planned. She had just had enough. So she upped and left.

While admitting this is what most likely happened, the way it happened leaves all sorts of unanswered questions.

I do not know Constitutional Law and I do not know if this sets a precedent or not. Certainly, in our system, it is an MP that is elected, and not a party, as happens in some countries. The MP is elected for the full term. That is also why we have multiple choices in elections so that people can choose between different candidates from the party of their choice.

We have had MPs who crossed over to the other side and remained there for the rest of the legislature. Even though we have a two-party system, there have been cases where MPs declared themselves as independent, although it was difficult to give them a seat in the middle, given the configurations of the seats in the Richard England House.

Here, as we could see in the rest of the week, Ms Farrugia kept her seat among the Labour MPs.

But still it will be difficult for her to function in her new role. The House is governed by the whip system and since she now does not have a whip, she will have to rely on the Opposition Whip to get - for example - speaking time. Although she says she is neither going to cross over to the Opposition side nor join the Nationalist Party, it will only be through the Nationalist Party that she will get a chance to speak at least at the pre-set times like speaking on the Adjournment. She will be able to raise questions at Question Time and raise points of order but, as far as I know, she needs to obtain clearance from the Opposition Whip if she wishes to speak during a debate.

In her letter of resignation, Ms Farrugia also resigned from the Environment Committee she was chairing (with quite some success). The party, and party leader Joseph Muscat, made it clear that they have no intention of re-appointing her. She may jibe to her heart's content "I have got rid of you" but the fact is it is the party that has also "got rid" of her.

She has climbed the tree and gone out on a limb - and she has now sawn the limb off the tree.

This is obviously one way of looking at it. It's her hara-kiri, she fell on her sword.

As long as she remained a Labour MP, we all knew she was definitely critical of the Muscat administration but she was still "in". Now things have reached such a stage that she has thrown everything out of the window and left.

So in a way she has fallen into a crevice of the parliamentary system. She is an MP but belongs to neither party. She is no longer the chair of the Environment Committee. She has already said she does not intend to campaign for reelection. Those who do that start feeling power slide away from them as people look to the new candidates.

But this description does not in any way describe Marlene Farrugia. On Thursday I was, as I usually do on Thursdays, at Mepa and she walked in to bolster the small and doughty Birzebbuga group (and AD's Carmel Cacopardo, their consultant), in their arguments against the Freeport. She helped in that the Mepa board suspended the two Freeport applications - something that had never happened in the past, except for one case - on the eve of a European Parliament election - when the Freeport application was thrown out and quietly given back to them a few months later, with the EP election over.

Ms Farrugia, characteristically, spoke and spoke again and her declarations were quite sensational.

In other words, she has no intention of shutting up or retreating into a corner. On the contrary, just as her presence at Mepa was a first (at least at this level) so too has her resignation been accompanied by a new burst of activity on her part.

She may have lost power of the institutional sort but she has gained - is gaining - power of a different order, the power to deconstruct the Moviment that Joseph Muscat put together and that won so handsomely in 2013.

I connect her to what Anglu Farrugia said before the election: that Labour has become in thrall to the developers. Marlene has said as much over the past few days.

We all know the consequence of that claim by Dr Farrugia, but I have no doubt that Ms Farrugia will neither shut up nor be appeased by any gewgaw. It is now a fight to the finish.

Late on Friday she also smoked out what has always been there but which has been kept under wraps pending the Moviment - Labour's real roots in mob violence, violent threats. Joe Debono Grech's threats must have been music to her ears.

Beyond the Moviment - real Labour divide, there is the way Labour has been taken over by the construction lobby. It knows that Labour is its real saviour but we, on the other hand, know that this diarchy carries untold consequences for the Malta of the future, if there is one at all. Not satisfied with having saddled Malta with more apartments than are needed, nor with having degraded what remains of the countryside, nor with having created a monster industry that cannot be controlled - the previous PN administrations have so much to answer for here - Labour, since it is in government, must continue to feed the tiger or else the tiger will turn round and gobble it up.

Sustainability, balance, have gone the way of the dodo.