Simon Busuttil, who will officially step down from the helm of the Nationalist Party today, delivered his swan song departure speech at a party event on Friday night. And that swan song will, it can be safely predicted, turn out to be his lasting legacy.

In that speech he pledged to be, as a Member of Parliament, steadfast in his fight against corruption, his struggle to see justice done on the several fronts that he has opened in the courts of law against what he saw as a corruption-riddled government that must be held to account.

The Labour Party had been elected in 2013, in great part, on a tidal wave of anti-corruption mantras. The then Labour opposition had campaigned vociferously against what it deemed to have been a corrupt government, the epitome of which was the oil procurement scandal, which at the end of the day turned out to have contained more hot air than that emitted from the power station's smokestack - despite a specially-appointed Public Accounts Committee having been convened to hear the accusations.

It was the Labour Party that had pledged to fight bad governance and corruption on every front, but it was a pair of the leading members of that same party that had set up secret companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand while the corpse of the last administration was still warm - unbeknownst to anyone until the Panama Papers revelations exploded a whole three years later.

While journalists and newspapers initially did their part, and have continued to do so, it was Busuttil in the political arena that turned Labour's anti-corruption mantra on its head and threw it back in its face.

Yes, the Panama Papers' revelations were virtual manna from heaven for an opposition leader but there was something about Busuttil's fight that made it evident and clear for most to see that it was not merely a fight for the cynical sake of political mileage, it was a fight for good governance that he truly and wholeheartedly believed in.

That can be said without a shadow of a doubt. His outrage was sincere and his demands for political accountability were not just about his or his party's political exigencies or aspirations.

Then came the final straw - the allegation that the Prime Minister himself was involved in the nasty Panama business. That, in turn led the Prime Minister to call last June's snap election, which, truth be told, turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice for Busuttil.

The election in which the Nationalist Party that he led fared so badly was not called by him, it was called by a wily Prime Minister who sensed that something had to be done before matters escalated beyond his control. And the Prime Minister played every card in his hand perfectly. 

He knew very well that the people were already by that point suffering from a severe case of scandal fatigue, and he knew that the multiple electoral pledges he would make, with the help of the power of incumbency, would serve as a welcome relief.

Yet Busuttil continued to fight the good fight, having perhaps erroneously judged the majority of the population by his own yardstick. He did, after all, have several worthy electoral proposals, but those seemed to have been drowned out by the continuous corruption accusations, which were what the election was essentially about - a fact that most seemed to have forgotten about by the end of the campaign.

Busuttil fell on his sword after that scathing defeat and resigned soon after. It was, after all, only the right thing to do. He could have, perhaps, sought to cling to power but that is clearly not in his rulebook, the rulebook from which he preached and the rulebook that he himself played by during his time at the helm of the Opposition.

As with any political leader, Busuttil's legacy will be interpreted differently by different people of different political stripes. Some smaller people will continue to remind him that he will be the first PN leader to have never become Prime Minister. Does that really matter?

What does matter is that Busuttil has left an indelible mark on Maltese politics; he has upped the ante, raised the bar and set a new standard in Maltese politics that will not be forgotten. And thanks to that, every government from now on will be held to new levels of accountability and good governance - not just by the media or the public but, hopefully, by their very own members.