It’s funny, isn’t it, how people’s minds sometimes work – or don’t. You think they’re pretty intelligent, you work on that basis, and then something happens and it suddenly hits you that they can’t really be that bright because they’re unable to see the big picture or foresee the consequences of their actions, still less the implications

When you think that somebody’s fairly smart and you act on that understanding, you can end up with a real disaster on your hands if that person reacts in a way that’s so daft and stupid that you couldn’t have predicted it because, quite simply, for years you had thought they were clever. But there you go.

It’s usually when they’re under great pressure that you can work out how sharp people truly are. It’s not just grace under pressure that you have to be looking at. When people’s thinking-skills desert them at times of crisis, then they probably didn’t have very many to begin with. It is true that they have to live with the stupidity of their actions for years to come, if not for the rest of their lives sometimes, but the trouble is that so do those around them.

Now let’s take Nationalist MP Franco Debono, who is threatening not to vote with the government whip tomorrow against the Opposition’s motion for Austin Gatt’s resignation. He and Labour leader Joseph Muscat were in the same class at school: at St Aloysius College, as it turns out, which has given us most of our politicians in recent decades. To say that there was rivalry between them on the matter of who got the highest marks and the most prizes would be an understatement. This ‘smartest boy in the class’ tag seems to have shaped their self-image. When Muscat gave his first speech as party leader to a hall full of admiring delegates, he started his oddly worded third-person autobiography by saying that “there was once a boy who was quite clever at school”.

It’s nauseating, I know, but also significant. I don’t think it entirely incidental that they are both much-cherished mothers’ pets, because boys who are cast in that role in childhood grow up to be hell for everyone else, as many a woman with divorce papers in her hands will tell you. It was Muscat’s classroom rival Franco Debono who scored the highest marks in a host of subjects and who walked off with several prizes every year. Muscat lagged behind because he lacks – even as we can observe today – the tenacity and single-mindedness which Debono, for better or worse, demonstrates on a regular basis. I think Muscat is fundamentally lazy, with a tendency to cut corners, take the easy way out, let others do the work, and rest on his laurels, such as they are.

But now, for the first time in the lifelong competition between these two, things are set to change. I imagine that when the Opposition leader brought before parliament his motion for a cabinet minister’s resignation, he never thought for a moment that it would be the boy who persistently competed with him and beat him in class (not physically, I hasten to add for the benefit of speakers of Globish) who would help him carry it through.

He probably thought it would be the Tooth Fairy, or Jesmond Mugliett, who still hasn’t told us what he did with his STEPS scholarship money.

So when the Tooth Fairy refused to play his game - though we don’t know yet what STEPS Mugliett plans to take - and Franco Debono stepped up to the plate instead, Muscat must have been thrilled. Not only would he be able now to get what he wants with his motion, but he would have the supreme pleasure of getting it from his classroom nemesis.

Finally, after 25 years, Muscat is going to win one over Debono, and what’s more, at Debono’s expense. That Muscat is party leader and stands to become prime minister soon, while he is what he thinks of as a mere backbencher who should be a cabinet minister, is already galling for Franco Debono. And that is why I just cannot understand why he is doing his utmost to help him become prime minister with even greater ease, while he stands to lose even his backbench status in the general election that makes that happen.

If Franco Debono persists in this course of action, his status and credibility will shrink so that Joseph Muscat’s can grow. While Muscat’s political career will, if Debono behaves badly on Friday, get right back on track after a period of serious derailment as people begin to realise how ridiculous and perfectly useless he is as leader of the Opposition let alone prime minister, Debono’s own career will lie in shreds. Refusing to vote against an ‘enemy’ motion for the removal of one of your colleagues, when your party has a one-seat majority in the house, is an act of political hara kiri and no, like the Tooth Fairy, when he seeks to bring down his own government Debono does not represent the people who voted for him.

These two and STEPS Mugliett need to understand that the people who voted for them and put them in parliament did so because they want to see the Nationalists in government, not Labour. When they receive accolades from all those Labour politicians and electors who are cheering them on and instigating them to do their worst, they should remember that these people voted against them and will do so again, precisely because they want to take their place.

But as I said up top, sometimes you spend years thinking people are bright and then find out to your dismay that they’re not as bright as you thought they were, though clearly, they think they are the business.