Love him or hate him, reviled or revered, one thing is certain: MP Franco Debono and the stances he has so staunchly taken have led the general public to ask a lot of questions about the way in which the country is being run and to do a considerable amount of soul searching, which, in itself, can never be a bad thing.

We have said in the past and we will continue to say that the good Dr Debono raises a number of valid points in his contestations with the government of which he forms a part, but, we believe, there is a fundamental problem with his delivery and the way he tackles the issues.

The man has a certain flair that appeals to not inconsiderable swathes of the public, but whether his political future holds any kind of future to speak of will be determined not on Thursday – a deal or a lack thereof will be struck or not struck on the accountability that Dr Debono is demanding before that decisive day. Thursday, presumably, will be about the drama.

We will make no final appeals for stability of the country, as we have already done that. We have argued that this is not the right time for a general election, we do not need the whole system being thrown out of whack, what with the economy here and abroad already under serious threat.

An election in such a politically charged country brings most things – business and the economy included – to something of a grinding halt, and an unplanned election obviously has an even more pronounced effect on the national psyche and national productivity.

But all that is quite beside the point at this juncture. Should no deal be struck, it will be up to Dr Debono to make his last stand on Thursday − a day that could very well turn out to be the Prime Minister’s last stand should an election be necessitated by either an abstention by Dr Debono or a straightforward vote in favour of the motion.

Over recent weeks, Dr Debono has been ridiculed from so many different quarters and in so many different ways, but it cannot be denied that he has also caught a lot of attention from the general public, and his name will be on a great number of wagging tongues this morning and in the coming week, such is the extent to which he has managed to captivate so much of the country – for better or for worse.

Tomorrow, Parliament heads into three days of heavy debate on confidence in the government, and a quick yet decisive vote on Thursday early afternoon.

But will those three days of debate all be geared towards merely convincing Franco Debono that the government is doing a good job? Certainly not.

What those three days will be about is setting the stage for an election campaign. Those three days of debate, followed possibly by a starting pistol on Thursday, will all be about public consumption, about convincing the people that the government, despite whatever it dissenting MP might say, is doing a good job. The Opposition, in the short time it has requested, will of course argue to the contrary. We listeners, on the other hand, will need to judge for ourselves.

An obscenity in itself

When Labour MP Owen Bonnici lamented this week that the committee established in April 2010 to modernise the country’s definition of what, exactly, constitutes an obscenity has not met because the minister responsible had “slept on the matter”, the issue was almost an obscenity in itself.

After all the fuss about censorship, and the issue the Opposition had rightly made of it, it transpires that the committee, of which Dr Bonnici himself is a member, has failed to meet because the committee had decided to utilise the resources and facilities of Parliament for its meetings, but the House Business Committee has, unbelievably, still to reply to a request along such lines filed back in October 2010.

So the obscenity committee, after all the hype, has not met because it has not been allocated a room in which to do so? It seems the whole committee and not just the minister responsible is ‘sleeping on the matter’.