With every day that passes, we all wonder whether the current political mess can get any worse. Will this saga ever stop?

The details, emerging from the pits of this seemingly never ending story, are shocking. People are getting sick of it. In the beginning, many may have doubted some of the stories revealed in the media. Now, these same people are seriously concerned as to how much further all this will go.

Although Daphne Caruana Galizia is renowned for the verve and satire of her writing, the volumes and details she has revealed in the past weeks cannot possibly be the fruit of her imagination. For weeks, the revelations came solely from her blog. Then things started to change.

Journalists from Net News first discovered and filmed the owner of Pilatus Bank, and his risk manager, taking the long way home through an emergency exit to escape the journalists. Then, in a tragicomic moment, they discovered the Commissioner of Police, choosing to evade his responsibility by going out with his friends for a fenkata. And we all thought Nero playing his harp while Rome was burning may have been a fictitious episode in our history books!

Then, on Tuesday, someone decided to pluck up courage and go to the man who has been tirelessly working for the truth to come out. Simon Busuttil revealed he was given irrefutable and damning evidence which could see the Castille clique go directly to prison.

Of course, there are still those who wish this mess was all an exaggerated fiction. Muscat may be one of these people but my concern is for those ordinary people who have nothing to do with politics, who have steered away from it and who are sick in the stomach because of what is going on.

People who, only a few days ago, couldn’t care less about politics, are feeling drawn into something filthy and dirty, which they didn’t ask for. These same people may have had the comfort of looking away and carrying on with their own lives. Today they are realising that this mess is affecting their jobs and their life. Looking away is a luxury they simply cannot afford.

I met these people last Sunday in Valletta. They felt they had to be part of a united force against corruption and in favour of the national interest. The crowd was huge, even though Glenn Bedingfield is finding it hard to digest this reality. However, more than the size of the crowd, what intrigued me was the type of crowd. There were people from all walks of life and who don’t usually attend political events. They were in Valletta to say that, at least, they tried to stop this meltdown of our financial system and reputation.

By refusing to resign, Muscat is condemning our economy to slide down a very slippery slope... into the abyss of a Third World banana republic. History will not only condemn him for his immoral and dubious ways. It will also condemn him for his hubris.

I have written about this over and over again in this space and, now that it is happening, I can’t believe Muscat (or anybody around him for that matter) is failing to see the writing on the wall which history and literature have revealed to us repeatedly.

Muscat, like the characters depicted by Sophocles, Milton, Marlowe and many others, is too proud to see his downfall. Sadly, Muscat’s downfall is not just his own but could possibly be that of a very fragile small nation.

Hubris is a typical flaw in the personality of a character who enjoys a powerful position, as a result of which he overestimates his capabilities to such an extent that he loses contact with reality. A character suffering from hubris tries to cross normal human limits and violates moral codes. Many examples of hubris are found in the major characters of tragic plays.

Alas, ours is not a play. It is reality, the only one we have.