Late yesterday afternoon, he told the press that he will not say what he would do if Joseph Muscat calls for a vote of (no) confidence in the government. So far, he has said that he will not support the government, which is not the same thing as saying that he will vote against, though it has been interpreted as such even by the Labour Party.

Debono now holds the balance of power between the two parties and he’s loving it, to steal a phrase from a hamburger chain. What he loves most of all is that he is keeping them both guessing, on tenterhooks and increasingly flustered and unable to take proper decisions. Both parties are saying ‘Will he, won’t he’ and it amuses him greatly. He’s quite obviously getting a huge kick out of it and more fool both parties for letting him get it.

Here’s what I think he’s working up to with his games of brinkmanship and revenge. He’s going to try to get as much as he can from the Nationalist Party by letting them think he’s going to vote against the government. This is the strategy he has deployed so far and he has described it on television as ‘inżid id-doża’ (increasing the dose, or idiomatically, upping the ante). Meanwhile, by suggesting, though not saying so specifically and explicitly, that he will vote against the government, he has put Joseph’s and Michelle’s saliva glands into overdrive at the thought that they will get to be John and Jackie Kennedy a year sooner than expected and with a landslide victory. When the stage is set, and Muscat cannot contain his excitement any longer at the thought of being handed the premiership by – of all people – his classroom nemesis, Franco Debono will pull back, abstain, and leave Joseph Muscat high and dry with his excitement.

Then Franco Debono will laugh himself sick, and I probably will do so too, if only because it’s a whole lot better than weeping with despair at the thought of having so many strange men in parliament.

Yesterday afternoon, Franco Debono joined in the Labour Party’s tune that it is the prime minister who has caused all this, that it is Lawrence Gonzi and his stubbornness that are to blame. Gonzi is to blame because he won’t obey his backbencher and resign. The spectacular nerve is quite impressive, for all the wrong reasons, but I think where Franco Debono is concerned, we have all given up trying to find rhyme or reason in his behaviour. He probably thinks that he is doing to Gonzi what Mintoff did to Paul Boffa, but it’s a sad miscalculation.

It doesn’t help, either, that he keeps talking about how “disgruntled Nationalists have no voice in the party”. Who are these disgruntled Nationalists who have no voice in the party? My experience of people who vote is that they do just that – vote once every five years and follow proceedings off the news and internet discussions. They don’t want or need to get involved in the actual political party or make their voice heard within the party hierarchy or administration.

So whoever Debono is talking about or talking to, it is certainly not electors but the sort of people who want to run the machine. You know, like him. Except that he doesn’t want to run the party machine but the government machine. By now, we should have worked out how he thinks: if Franco Debono doesn’t personally like something, then it must be changed. He didn’t like the law course (except in the first year when they read subjects he enjoyed), so he told this newspaper that the law course should be structured differently. You know, because he didn’t enjoy it and found parts of it difficult and incomprehensible, causing him to miss many lectures.

But the war on Lawrence Gonzi goes on. “Party leaders come and go, and the internal organs of the party should be very careful not to prejudice the future of the party,” he said. This self-delusion is breath-taking. Translated, he means that he has issued a threat with concomitant demands, and if those demands are not met, then he will deliver on his threat and the consequences will be Lawrence Gonzi’s fault, his party’s fault, for not acceding to his demands.

Unfortunately, in his current transport of passion, Franco Debono does not realise that he has begun to contradict himself rather too often. His present claim is that he resigned from the Nationalist Party “months ago”. How, then, is he upset because he was not involved in the cabinet reshuffle or because that cabinet reshuffle was not made to his liking? Why was he on Bla Aġenda last Saturday complaining that he wasn’t made a minister, when he had resigned from the Nationalist Party months before, was no longer a Nationalist MP, and so couldn’t be made a government minister?

Sadly, tragically, he has brought it all back to political party financing. It is not that we don’t need legislation on political party financing, though that is now an irrelevance in the present scenario. It is that once more, this is all about him. Few people appear to know that his law thesis was about – yes, political party financing. It wasn’t a particularly good thesis, and it was written many years ago, but that doesn’t matter because the fact that he wrote his thesis on the subject has made the subject his. It must be given immediate attention and nobody else is allowed to touch it.

Truly, Malta has a problem on its hands, and its name is certainly not Lawrence Gonzi.