This past week has given us some great lessons in Maltese democracy, which is the spiritual child of all those other great democracies of the Mediterranean, which gave us Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, General Franco, the Greek generals, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the Sicilian Mafia.

Britain’s version of democracy was foisted on us by the colonial oppressor at a time when we barely understood it - and still do not. And all these decades later, boy, does it still show - because you can’t really impose democracy on societies which are not culturally attuned to it, as far more recent experiments have shown. True democracy is a natural development in time and space; it grows out of a particular set of circumstances. Russia has a parliament, but nobody can say that Russia is democratic. Italy changes its governments like it changes its underpants, but it is one of the least democratic places in Europe.

We have a similar problem in Malta. We have the democratic tools, but we don’t really know what they mean. This is because we have no handle on the values and spirit that informed their creation. We bought those tools, so to speak, at the supermarket, but they were the wrong size.

One of the most fundamental democratic tools, the parliamentary vote, was used last Wednesday to perform a supremely anti-democratic act: the lynching of a cabinet minister through the collusion of, on the one hand, a spiteful desire for vengeance and, on the other hand, the opportunistic view that the end justifies the means.

This is a first for Malta, a new low. A demand for a parliamentary vote of no confidence in a cabinet minister must be predicated on a specific act of very serious wrong-doing: signing a secret arms deal with Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, for example. It is not proposed on the basis of routine handling of his portfolio.

And even then, it is proposed, and taken, only when the prime minister is not in a position to take the flak himself, as the person ultimately responsible for that secret arms deal, unless it was signed behind even his back, which cannot be countenanced. So the vote of no confidence would be on the prime minister, and not on his minion or delegate in the cabinet.

What we saw with this collusion between government MP Franco Debono and the Opposition is a negation of one of the fundamental cornerstones in our British model of parliamentary democracy and government: that it is the absolute prerogative of a prime minister to appoint and dismiss the members of his cabinet. What we have now is a situation in which, if one government MP doesn’t like the prime minister’s choices, all he has to do is ring up Mullah Muscat and strike a deal to have him removed.

Not satisfied with this horrendous display of their time-honoured Mediterranean take on democracy – that it is there only to be used cynically for one’s own ends, and how convenient that those naive people put those tools there for us to use in achieving our corrupt goals – both Franco Debono and Mullah Muscat went one further.

With absolutely no understanding of how his thinking and statements would be perceived and reported back to head office by the ambassadors and high commissioners of more democratically sophisticated countries than ours, or why that reasoning and those statements would be considered shocking, Debono announced one of the demands he has been making of the prime minister since the first week of January. This was that the prime minister should take to an open podium and condemn me before the media for writing about his appearance with his mother on Malta’s most widely viewed show, Xarabank.

So let’s boil this down to its essence. Here we have a member of parliament who thinks it perfectly acceptable to blackmail his prime minister and that there is nothing wrong in talking about it, because blackmailing prime ministers is normal and democratic. Here we also have a member of parliament who has been making scenes for five months about one humorous line on a blog, which he took literally, and who is not embarrassed to say so and to demand sympathy. And here we also have a member of parliament who makes a meal of his high values and principles in voting against an “under-performing” cabinet minister but who, in the next breath, says that he would have changed his mind if the prime minister did this or that. This is a man straight out of the cultural lap of Benito Mussolini. Well, perhaps not. That would be setting standards too high. He is straight out of the lap of a town councillor in Corleone.

Seeking to maximise mileage and get Franco Debono to change his mind about not voting against the government this week, Mullah Muscat joined in the chorus, condemning me for having the temerity to poke fun at Franco and saying that the prime minister should stop me. The prime minister should stop me? Where does he think we are living, in Il-Guy’s Tripoli? The prime minister can’t stop me even if he wanted to. It would be illegal. Of course, he could try illegal means in the traditional Labour fashion, like bombs, threats and arson, but I somehow don’t think he will. Even speaking out against what people choose to write in their newspaper columns and their blogs is a very bad idea for a prime minister, even though perfectly legal. It’s just not done, because it is perceived as putting pressure on those who write them, and falls within the anti-democratic class of behaviour that is frowned upon elsewhere. A prime minister may criticise the media for illegal behaviour (like phone-hacking in Britain), but he may not criticise journalists for exercising their right and duty to express their opinion.

How does Mullah Muscat plan to stop me when he is the prime minister? This is an important question, but none of my colleagues in the media seem to believe it has to be asked. Unfortunately, the media here are hamstrung by the very same spirit and attitudes that shape our political scene.

I ask you to try to imagine what would happen to a British MP who announced that he had been making scenes for months, and trying to blackmail the prime minister, about a joke cracked on the internet after he paraded his mother on prime-time television. The press and the public would maul him. He would be mocked, derided and laughed out of town. He would be the subject of television comedy for the next 10 years. And I can just picture what his fellow MPs would say about him in the House.

These past few weeks, and there is more ahead, have been a democratic test for Malta, and we have failed it.

If Mullah Muscat thinks that he is liberal, European and progressive, all he has to do is check his attitude towards the expression of opinion against the reaction of a certain sort of Muslim to the publication of those Mohammed cartoons in Denmark. They literally could not understand how the Danish government could not stop them, or why it shouldn’t stop them. Franco Debono and his partner Joseph Muscat show the same catastrophic failure to truly understand the values, which shaped the other part of Europe.

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