The fact that the Prime Minister did not convene Parliament while he was abroad at the informal EU summit this week and the government’s decree that the House of Representatives will not convene unless all 35 of its MPs are present and accounted for in the country was greeted with supposed shock and horror by some quarters this week.

And while they have cried foul and accused the Prime Minister of holding the country and its Parliament ‘hostage’ to the Nationalist Party’s internal problems, the fact of the matter is that, given the persistent lack of a parliamentary pairing agreement, this situation is, in reality, nothing new nor is it anything surprising.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Opposition had withdrawn, and rightly so many would agree, from an agreement on parliamentary pairing, as well as from the House committee on constitutional reform – the Select Committee on Democratic Change – in the aftermath of the BWSC vote debacle back in May 2010.

To refresh memories of that night, government MP Mario Galea had clearly yet obviously unintentionally voted in favour of an Opposition motion condemning the government’s Delimara power station extension contract.

After fumbling his vote, a number of government MPs had then turned on Labour MP Justyne Caruana and accused her also of having voted incorrectly, against the Opposition motion – an accusation later taken to task by subsequent recordings of the sitting. The Opposition had stormed out of Parliament that night, en masse, and a second vote was later held, which was carried by the government 35-0.

Put very simply, the Opposition had demanded an apology from government MPs over what they insist was an utter lie in Dr Caruana’s respect, short of which it would withdraw from parliamentary pairing as well as from the select committee.

That apology has never materialised, nor is it ever likely to, and as a consequence the pairing agreement was thrown out the window. The parliamentary pairing agreement provides, or rather provided, that should an MP need to be absent from Parliament while on government business when there is to be a vote scheduled, that an MP from the other side of the House does not vote either – a rational enough agreement entered into in the interest of not just fair play, but also in the interest of the continued smooth running of Parliament when MPs need to be abroad, which, for obvious reasons, has been increasingly the case since Malta’s 2004, EU accession.

Further compounding matters in May 2010, in the aftermath of the voting debacle the Opposition then took the government by surprise soon after and called two unexpected votes on amendments to the Mepa reform bill – catching the government off guard with one of its MPs, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, abroad on government business.

The votes were eventually held and the Speaker had to cast the deciding vote in the government’s favour. The government insists there had been a clear agreement on when the votes were to have been taken, and, in an interview soon after with our sister Sunday newspaper, the Prime Minister remarked that the Opposition had ‘crossed a red line’, and that red line exists to this day.

As such, and given recent developments in Parliament, it is of little surprise that the government is extremely wary of convening the House if even one MP, let alone the Prime Minister himself, is abroad on government business.

And with the Opposition to this day holding firm in its demand that Dr Caruana is apologised to, there seems little hope of re-establishing any kind of pairing agreement and, perhaps more seriously given the not insignificant number of amendments to the Constitution being floated by political parties, the work of the select committee appears doomed to never even get off the ground.