I get the strangest feeling that by the end of today Joseph Muscat and his cronies will have realised that unlike Franco Debono they are not poker players

They do not know how to bluff, they do not know how to counter-bluff and they do not know how to call somebody’s bluff. And above all, they haven’t worked out the most fundamental principle of all when you are the third party who hopes to gain when one person wages war on another: that if you are to gain, the person waging war must dislike you less than he dislikes the person on whom he is waging that war.

By their actions shall ye know them: but how many political observers and even politicians, to say nothing of electors, actually stop to assess the behaviour of those who move across the stage, and what this behaviour says about their intelligence and their ability to work out consequences and scenarios? Joseph Muscat failed to ask himself the most important question he should have asked: ‘Does Franco Debono hate me more than he dislikes the prime minister?’ He would know, I imagine, that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘Yes’, and if he doesn’t, then we should be worried about his lack of insight. At this stage, however, we can concern ourselves with worrying about his lack of foresight, which has been demonstrated over the last few weeks as catastrophically as it was in his views about European Union membership and his failure to understand that the Yes vote had won the referendum.

In a situation in which he is Franco Debono’s hate object – there has been ample evidence from which to deduce as much, all over the media – was it ‘safe’ (to quote his own word back at him) for Joseph Muscat to assume that despite his pathological feelings towards him, Debono would still choose to hand him the prime minister’s head on a plate? Or does Muscat, in his great self-satisfaction, actually think that Debono dislikes the prime minister more than he dislikes the leader of the Opposition?

If Muscat is aware that Debono’s feelings about him are far more virulent than his feelings about the prime minister, yet still proceeded with a ‘no confidence’ motion, then God help us when he is making decisions as a prime minister himself. His decisions as leader of the Opposition inspire little enough confidence as it is. Perhaps Muscat saw all this, and didn’t want to proceed with a ‘no confidence’ motion at all. As I write this, a little electric bulb has gone off inside my head, like in those cartoons. I have been searching for a reasonable explanation why it was Anġlu Farrugia, not his leader, who brought the private member’s motion before parliament. It is Anġlu Farrugia’s motion, not Joseph Muscat’s, and despite the fact that Muscat claimed it as his own in a television interview afterwards, he was unconvincing. If it really was his own, if he was really the one who wanted to do it, then why didn’t he? We might well be looking at a situation in which Anġlu Farrugia did it against his boss’s will – it was a private member’s motion, after all, and he didn’t need permission – and Muscat went along with the show because he wasn’t about to try stopping the man who wanted to be party leader himself. After all, some rather unfortunate examples of what an erstwhile rival can do to you have been put on very public display on the other side of the house.

No reporter asked the leader of the Opposition this straight and plain question: ‘Why didn’t you sign it yourself?’ The answer would have been interesting. “I was in the lavatory at the time,” perhaps, or “I had cramp in my right hand.”

I might, of course, be dreadfully wrong and Franco Debono – after copious riffling among the pages of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and much inspiration on letting go of the ego – will overcome his consuming dislike of his old classmate and vote to help make him prime minister. Then he will commit hara kiri, metaphorically speaking, it goes without saying. But somehow, I don’t think so. And neither does Joseph, which is why he hasn’t called his rabid crowd to St George’s Square to await in physical proximity the murder of the Nationalist government by the hand of Franco Debono.