If the Nationalist Party does not come down hard on Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, Franco Debono and Jesmond Mugliett, the electorate will come down hard on the Nationalist Party.

If the prime minister does not ram, especially, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando firmly back into his box and sit on it, the electorate will do that to him. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando almost lost the Nationalist Party the last general election. Now he is going out of his way to inflict as much damage as possible and lose the next one. If he has secretly switched to Labour and failed to inform the Speaker, then he is a fool (but we knew that already). Labour will use him until 2013 and then fail to take him on. Even a party which needs to fill its skip will not burden itself with the sort of problems they have seen him create over the last three years or so. Pullicino Orlando faces a future doing little more than look into people’s mouths in a world where dentists don’t make the news or score the front page, and it frightens him.

People can tolerate many things, even violence and corruption, as we have seen in our unfortunate past. But they cannot stand weakness in the face of unbridled defiance, hostility and what appear to be increasing manifestations of personality problems. Lawrence Gonzi, in his role as prime minister and his other role as party leader, is being publicly and constantly humiliated by the behaviour of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando.

It is not what Pullicino Orlando says and does which humiliates the prime minister, because Pullicino Orlando has scant credibility and is neither trusted nor respected. His shouting and tantrums on television, and his obsessive-compulsive inappropriate use of Facebook have long since put paid to that, even if the barefaced lying did not.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando humiliates the prime minister in a way he cannot even begin to understand, because he actually believes what he is saying. He humiliates him by exposing the prime minister’s, his party leader’s, inability to control him. Pullicino Orlando weakens the prime minister not by the specifics of what he says and does, but by showing the electorate on a now daily basis that the prime minister has neither the will nor the ability to do anything about it.

The public perception is that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Franco Debono are running the country by default, by holding the balance of power in the House and deciding which votes should pass and which to block or defeat. The tail is now wagging the dog.

Stooping to conquer is a sign of strength, yes, and the public can read it as such. So when the prime minister and Mrs Gonzi went to Franco Debono’s home after he failed to turn up to parliament for an important vote, electors were angry but on reflection they did not see this as an unnecessary debasement. They worked out that needs must when the devil drives, and moved on to the next thing.

But when the humiliation is chronic and, more crucially, when it escalates and when Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and now Franco Debono continue to raise their game, pushing at the boundaries like the teenage children of weak-willed older parents who are frightened of their children and cannot handle the situation, then public perception shifts. The comparison to angry and aggressive teenagers and weak older parents is a good one, because what usually happens in such situations is that the situation escalates to the point where the parents are beaten up and overpowered completely.

Public perception of this situation has shifted dramatically and seriously. The prime minister is no longer seen as a patient and much-tried man coping with the tedious antics of two difficult MPs. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is now perceived as dangerously unstable and the prime minister is seen as completely unable to handle him. In the electorate’s eyes, that is a perilous situation.

The prime minister cannot communicate the message that he can handle the running of the country when he can’t even handle a party backbencher who shows signs of deepening emotional disturbance.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is a problem not because he opposes his own party’s policies and measures. He is a problem because a person who has ceased to act rationally no longer belongs in parliament. Certain aspects of Pullicino Orlando’s behaviour, including the obscenities he has now taken to uploading on Facebook even in the middle of the night, should also be attracting the attention – and action – of the Speaker of the House, part of whose duty it is to ensure that no member of parliament brings the House into disrepute.

Now we have Franco Debono actually telling his own party what to do. Imagine that. He has asked – for which read ‘told’ – the Nationalist Party’s executive council to discuss his threat to abstain from a parliamentary vote on the Opposition’s demand for Austin Gatt’s resignation.

Instead of the Nationalist Party cracking its whip, literally and figuratively, and snapping this man back into line, it sits there and takes it in the face. Sign of strength? It would be, if the public didn’t know already that it’s Debono who has all the leverage here because his party bosses, by debasing themselves before him, have lost his respect.

The golden rule with bullies – and I’m something of an expert in this because I spend most of my life dealing with them – is to face them down, to tell them ‘Go ahead, do your worst’. The worst thing you can do with people who have this kind of bullying personality is to appease them. When you appease them by allowing them to bite off your fingers, they come back and eat your arm, then keep right at it until there’s nothing left of you, even if they die gorging themselves in the process.

There are two ways of dealing with bullies like these. The first is the way Mintoff used, through violence and fear and intimidation, playing them at their own game and winning. The second is by far the most effective one because, unlike Mintoff’s method, it doesn’t have negative side-effects: Fenech Adami’s moral strength and steadfastness, which compels respect.

I cannot for the life of me imagine Fenech Adami allowing Franco Debono and most especially Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando to run riot like this, bringing the government, the Nationalist Party and even parliament into disrepute.

So what would he have done? He would have asserted his authority, and they would have been marginalised. The man who feels he is marginalised does not continue to throw his weight around in the way these three unpleasant individuals are doing. They throw their weight around because, deluded as they are about their own importance and achievements, they feel that they are in the right and that they have the support of others within their party and even of the electorate. Bullies can’t function outside a gang. Remove the gang they think is backing them, and the gang they will suddenly want to belong to is yours.

When Eddie Fenech Adami said on Bondi+ last week that he would never have tolerated Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s behaviour in going behind his back and that of his party, he meant it. And we knew it. But Pullicino Orlando would never have dared behave like that with Fenech Adami, because he would have known it too.

He behaves this way with the prime minister because he knows he can. He is inflicting death by a thousand cuts and he fully intends to protract it over the remaining 18 months in a very public display of torture and humiliation.

If the prime minister does not act immediately to stop the torture and humiliation, the electorate will seek an end to this intolerable situation by pressing for an early election.