The inevitable has happened and the prime minister has voted against the divorce bill. Yes, it was inevitable because there was no way that he was ever going to vote for it, and decency and common sense dictate that the prime minister cannot sit out in the parliament bar a vote on a significant bill like this

As I wrote in my column last Sunday, heroes do not sit on the fence, refusing to vote is sitting on the fence, and those who refuse to vote cannot portray themselves as heroes. I actually have more respect for those who voted No than I do for those who left the chamber before the vote.

But still I disagree with them, and I do so passionately and wholeheartedly. I disagree with them not only because their stance is utterly anti-democratic – why hold a referendum if you personally are not prepared to respect the outcome, leaving it up to others to do so? – but also because they do not hang themselves alone. They hang the Nationalist Party with them.

To see the prime minister and his cabinet, with the exception of Joe Cassar, Mario Demarco and Chris Said, vote against the bill was sad indeed, though entirely expected. They look like stuffed dinosaurs from another era already at this point. The feeling I get when looking at them is the feeling I used to get some 15 to 20 years ago, looking at the Nationalist ministers who had been familiar faces to me since my childhood in the 1970s – an ‘end of an era, enough is enough’ feeling, the sort of feeling that tells you it’s time to move on. All they needed to knock another nail in the coffin of public perception was to vote the way they did. It’s over for them now and they know it. If they don’t move on as individuals, the electorate will move the entire party on and away from the seat of government.

This is because the Nationalist Party has sold itself over the last couple of generations as the party of the new, the party of the forward-looking, the party of democracy and of individual dignity and liberty. And here its biggest and most senior cheeses are today, voting against the clear mandate of the electorate. It’s disgraceful, but they don’t see it that way. It’s all about conscience, a conscience that tells them to override and overrule a decision they themselves have asked the people to take for them.

What about all the people who voted No in the referendum, the prime minister and others asked? We have to respect the minority. But that is what divorce is all about, isn’t it – respecting the minority who wish to divorce. The minority who don’t wish them to divorce just don’t come into it at all. Whether Mr and Mrs Zammit divorce is not the prime minister’s business and it is their decision to take and not the prime minister’s.

But I’m not going to flog that dead old horse anymore. With their vote, the prime minister and his cabinet, bar those exceptions, have marked themselves out as the past. They are the ghosts at the feast already, and the party still has two years to play on. The tragic thing is that they have lost their authority, undermined their credibility and harmed their own standing, when they could have regained much lost ground and status by saying ‘I respect the will of the people. I will vote Yes.’

The prime minister and those who think as he does clearly do not understand that even people who voted No in the referendum prize democracy and understand that a No vote in parliament now is a two-fingered salute to all that. They understand – not all of them, for sure, but several to whom I have spoken – that you do not hold a referendum and then carry on regardless of the understanding that others in parliament will do your job for you and vote Yes.

The prime minister has every right to behave as he pleases as an ordinary MP, but he is no ordinary MP. When he commits political suicide, he takes his party with him. When people vote in general elections, they choose their prime minister, and there is a significant number of electors who don’t bother making a simple and straightforward comparison between the only two options for the role. They will not be able to see beyond the fact that the prime minister voted against the express will of the people whose opinion he specifically sought, and they will refuse to make him prime minister again. It will not concern them that the alternative is an ex Super One hack who thought that Malta would die a quick death in the European Union and who has been promoted way, way beyond his abilities. All they will know is that they don’t want to ‘reward’ Lawrence Gonzi for what he has done now. And the rest of the country will pay the price for their decision, as it did in 1996 when they rounded on Eddie Fenech Adami to the point where even a strange man in a bad wig was seen as preferable.

Gonzi seems to have forgotten that he won only by a hair’s breadth against Alfred Sant, who had been tried, tested and found very seriously wanting. How many people made a difference to his success in 2008? Seven hundred? What chance does he imagine he now has against Muscat?

Not everybody has the imagination or the insight to work out what Muscat will be like as prime minister from what he is like as leader of the opposition, from what he was like as Sant’s top campaigner against EU membership, nor do many have the ability to make deductions and extrapolations based on what they see now of his personality. I was astonished that people had failed to correctly assess Sant in 1996, but then rushed to the polls to get rid of him when they’d had him as prime minister for 22 months. Nothing that was evident when Sant was prime minister had not been evident already when he was leader of the opposition. They had just chosen not to look and see.

Not everybody thinks as I do, that what with everything and all, Gonzi remains streets ahead of Muscat in terms of ability, competence and trustworthiness, and that’s all that concerns me. What many others will see, even if they don’t have faith in Muscat, is that Gonzi voted against the will of the people, that holding the referendum was a cynical ploy that failed to work out for him, and that his inability to distinguish between personal opposition to divorce and understanding the need for divorce legislation is, quite simply, inexplicable in somebody of his intelligence, which means that he has probably put blind faith before democracy.

What a shame. Instead of taking this miraculously presented solution to the divorce problem, this deus ex machina, and running with it all the way to victory at the polls, the Nationalist Party has – to use a timeworn cliche – snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.