Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Evarist Bartolo have found another reason to become agitated.

This time it’s because they used Father Charles ta’ Cana’s face, voice and name in television advertisements which promote the Yes to Divorce vote – and this without having had the common decency and good sense (but then, what do you expect) to obtain his consent. Fr Vella immediately dispatched a ‘cease and desist’ letter through his lawyers to the Broadcasting Authority, which pulled the advertisements.

The over-excitable Jeffrey and Evarist are not content with having made utter fools of themselves with their self-important claims that the security services listened in to their telephone conversations (because there’s nothing more central to national security than a hot conversation about how to spell ‘bgħula’). They have now said that they will go to the Constitutional Court, presumably because their right to use Fr Charles Vella for advertising purposes, without his consent, has been breached.

It strikes me that they are a little confused. It is Fr Vella who has the right to sue here, and the Broadcasting Authority has worked this out – no doubt having sought the legal advice that Jeffrey’s and Evarist’s colleague, the lawyer Deborah Schembri, was not in a position to give them because she specialises in marital law and not matters of this nature. Evarist Bartolo, however, teaches communications at the University of Malta, so he should be well up to speed about what happens when people are used in advertising campaigns without their permission. A law suit is the usual consequence, as when Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and her husband went after Ryanair with the legal equivalent of a chainsaw.

Communications expert Evarist and dentist-politician Jeffrey don’t appear to know that there is a distinction – and not a fine one at all – between quoting somebody in a newspaper article or when speaking on television, and actually using that person in your advertising campaign to help sell whatever it is you happen to be selling, whether it’s cheap flights or divorce legislation.

The only words of advice I can give Jeffrey and Evarist right now – not that they’ll take them – is that with less than two weeks to go to the big day, they should calm down, keep quiet, dampen the hysteria, and let the No To Divorce campaigners drive out the Yes vote with their inane and maddening arguments. The tomfoolery of some of the Yes To Divorce campaigners and their idiotic billboards irritate the hell out of us, but this is as nothing compared to what we feel when we hear the undiluted rubbish pouring out of the No campaign and see their smug and satisfied faces on television, glowing with the belief that God is on their side while the rest of us are destined to dance with Satan for eternity.

At the start of the campaign, their credibility and respectable standing in society – especially when compared to some of the circus-acts on the other side – served to knock holes in the certainty of many of those who had planned to vote Yes. But over the last couple of weeks, as they have spoken more widely in the media, their infuriating opinions and arguments have begun to reverse that trend.

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Those Nationalist Party supporters are most unwise who say that they will not vote Yes, even though they are for divorce legislation, because they don’t want to help give Joseph Muscat the satisfaction of victory. If they imagine they are helping further the Nationalist Party’s interests by voting No or by not voting at all, then they do not understand what they are dealing with here.

This referendum is a pressure valve for the mounting anger and frustration against the government. If the government, which backs the No vote, loses this referendum, much of that anger and frustration will be assuaged. People who usually vote Nationalist but want to voice their burgeoning annoyance and disillusionment will not feel the need to let rip in the general election if they can put the Prime Minister and his Cabinet in their proper place in this referendum. But if the government wins this referendum, then it’s a different story and things will get really dangerous for the Prime Minister.

I suspect that not even the Nationalist Party itself fully grasps the magnitude of what it is up against, or has understood that a victory for the No vote in this referendum will hammer the last nail into its 2013 electoral coffin. A victorious No campaign will translate into a horrendous backlash in the general election against the Nationalist Party. Those who think a No victory will be perceived as the validation of the Prime Minister’s stance and of the Nationalist Party’s position are misguided in the extreme. They do not have a proper handle on public opinion – or more specifically, on the thinking and behaviour of those electors who are the Nationalist Party’s kingmakers at practically every general election.

The reasons why are too complex to go into here, but briefly put, this is because the referendum is no longer about divorce but about the separation of Church and State and the need to live free of overbearing religiosity, bossy interference and misplaced prudishness. Divorce is now no more than the symbol of a much wider and more pressing need to escape the clutches of a tal-muzew-ridden society and its controlling village elders.

Over the last few months, there has been an escalation of worrying incidents and encroachments on our freedoms, driven either by tub-thumping Catholicism or sheer mealy-mouthed prudishness. These have brought many people to breaking-point. They will be voting Yes in the divorce referendum not because they are particularly interested in divorce, but because they see it as a way of telling the growing army of vociferous chest-beaters and Mormon-like bossy-boots to get out of their faces, mind their own business and keep their religious beliefs to themselves instead of foisting them on everyone else.

The people who feel this way, and there are legions of them, are not going to sigh and say “Oh well” when the No vote wins the day. They will become angrier still. Their disillusionment and entirely justified irritation will continue to grow – more so if it is further fuelled by ministerial pronouncements on the Madonna’s emotional state and similar – until the next opportunity they get to tell the chest-beaters and ‘hold back the tide’ preachers exactly where and how to get out of their faces.

That will be in the general election of 2013. And because thousands of people who have had it up to here with interfering, controlling and bossy chest-beaters are the very ones who voted for the Nationalist Party in previous general elections, the Nationalist Party is in even greater trouble than it thinks. It had better begin praying – a stratagem entirely in keeping with its recent pronouncements and behaviour – for a Yes victory.