Much of what we are living through these days has a terrible sense of déjà vu.

In 1998, (it was in July – the only difference) the vote on the Vittoriosa waterfront renovation was not a vote of confidence.

Yet, Prime Minister Alfred Sant, egged on by those around him who made him believe he could win an election, spurred him on (not that he needed much encouragement) to turn a vote he could easily lose and shrug off, into a vote of confidence.

Dom Mintoff, cocky as usual, voted against the government.

The next day, Alfred Sant went to the same Vittoriosa waterfront and there made a speech that has remained famous for its vituperation of Mintoff, the man who for decades had symbolized the Malta Labour movement, as ‘the traitor’.

Alfred Sant duly lost the election, which was held at the beginning of September.

I am sure that there is much in Lawrence Gonzi that shrieks in him to do the same after Franco Debono’s vote against Carm Mifsud Bonnici on Wednesday. But I am equally sure, that today he will hold back from doing an Alfred Sant. I am not so sure what he will do that tomorrow after the vote of confidence in Parliament.

Certainly today at Luxol he will be surrounded, as Alfred Sant was at Vittoriosa in 1998, by a braying crowd eager to strike back at ‘the traitor’. Vittoriosa or Birgu was a Labour stronghold (and also a Dom Mintoff stronghold over the years) and Luxol is bang in the middle of the PN belt.

This will be nothing like the stately and composed atmosphere last Sunday at the PN general council. It will be the place and time for raw emotions, for the PN core showing how much it has been angered by Franco Debono’s suicide vote.

At this point, everything is up in the air. Over the past months, I have all along been saying it was ‘more May than September’ and maybe, come tomorrow, I will have missed by three or four days.

Past elections, both general and local, have been lost by the Nationalist Party not because Labour got more votes or because people shifted from PN to Labour, but because PN supporters just did not bother to go.

But after Wednesday, the PN government and party have been well and truly bloodied and people are eager, very eager, to see the PM call off this charade of a government without power and at the mercy of Franco Debono and an Opposition monolithic party and call Franco’s bluff once and for all. Franco Debono has made an impressive political manoeuvre: not only has he killed off any political future he may have had, but he has also awakened the PN support, not just the hard core one, but also the once in five years support and maybe also the one in three elections support. It has been years since someone did this.

Will that be enough to regain the country? Only time will tell.

This is the time for the real leader to come forth in Lawrence Gonzi. A leader shows his mettle in times of crisis. The day after the EU referendum, I would have thought the country needed a breather, and I said so. But Eddie Fenech Adami had other thoughts: there was no time like that to nail the Labour Party under Alfred Sant. So the election was held a month or so later and it not just confirmed the PN in power but it also confirmed Malta’s EU accession in such a way that even the Labour Party had to admit it.

This article is being written by itself: I started off with another plan in mind, but the article has practically written the words on its own.

In 1998, I had counselled prudence (anyone can check the leaders of The Malta Independent and see), not that Alfred Sant took any notice. He was also surrounded by sycophants who praised his abilities and who expressed blind faith in an electoral success. Later on, when Labour lost, some of those same people in his kitchen cabinet tried, unsuccessfully, to inherit the crown. Maybe things just worked out like that, but maybe too there was some self interest in their advice within the kitchen cabinet.

Certainly, by calling Dom Mintoff a traitor, Alfred Sant deprived his party from the important support of the Dom Mintoff core, and he did that in his Holy of Holies, the Vittoriosa waterfront that ironically Dom had fought so much to stop from commercialization. (Those people eating at the restaurants there and enjoying the sea breeze, have simply no idea of this historical background).

Even if he were, which I doubt, to call Franco Debono a traitor, Lawrence Gonzi will not be alienating any fringe supporters. Except maybe for those who supported John Dalli for the leadership, but I seriously doubt this. I doubt that John Dalli, with his past militancy in the party, and even with his anger and hurt at being swept aside in the leadership battle, could ally himself with Franco Debono. After all, Franco Debono took on CMB, who, along with his family, was not necessarily against John Dalli’s candidacy.

But still, I hope there is still a cell or two of prudence in Lawrence Gonzi’s psychological and political make-up. I am also certain that those in his entourage (not the daily ones, but the ones in the strategy group) have nothing in common with the confusion that surrounded Alfred Sant in 1998.

Maybe, the time is still not right, much as the party base would like to get going.

Maybe, too, CMB is not really suited to be the PN’s poster boy as the PN is building him up to be. Last time round, in 2008, its poster boy was JPO, and look where that got them.

Of course, there is no comparison between JPO and CMB, and JPO has taken pains to distance himself from Franco Debono and his actions. As have the rest of the rebels on the back bench.

Listening to the speeches in Parliament last week, I was struck by a number of points that seem to have escaped notice.

I was struck, negatively, by the Prime Minister’s speech. I have often noticed this in past speeches, especially those which I suspect he himself had written. They are simply a concatenation of sentences, like stream of consciousness, sometimes not very ordered and going round in circles.

I was also struck by the negative tone he used throughout the speech: there was no objectivity or attempt at balance in what he said. He was intent on just one thing: to demolish the Labour arguments by disdain more than by reason.

Then, of course, like the rest of them, Dr Gonzi did not refer once to Franco Debono.

Some have told me that could have sparked off Franco Debono into deciding to vote against the government. I very much doubt this. I believe Franco Debono intended right from the beginning to vote against if it was the last thing he did. (And after he did there was no Joe Debono Grech to run after him around Palace Square as he ran after Dom Mintoff in that fateful night in July 1998).

But then, I ask, why are we now being told there were negotiations going on all the time between the Office of the Prime Minister and Franco Debono offering him this or that or countering his demands on this or that? That, perhaps with hindsight, I say, was a very silly thing to do: you just do not negotiate with people like Franco Debono because you know that sooner or later he will do it. The issue should have been faced when he was accepted to be a party candidate, and if that was not done then, the issue should have been faced squarely and firmly instead of with this wishy-washiness. Look where it got the government.

I was struck by the speeches of Tonio Borg and Austin Gatt, both predecessors of CMB at the justice ministry, who seemed to dwell on other issues except on how they ran their ministries and how CMB ran his.

I was then struck by CMB’s tone and approach to his never ending speech. All he seemed to say was to list what ‘we’ did, law after law, issue after issue. He must have replied to every little thing brought up by the Opposition speakers but none at all to Franco Debono’s main charges. I submit he could as well have saved his breath for Franco Debono had long ago decided to stick the knife in.

However, I would have expected CMB to speak out against the injustice, the unfairness of it all, that just because the Opposition is monolithic and a maverick is out to get his target, a minister, whether he was a success or a failure, is doomed.

Then what to me is right unpardonable is that CMB thanked everyone at the end but forgot to thank his wife, the woman who stayed with him till the very end, the woman who, along with her family, attended the entire debate, the woman who can be seen in the photos at the end, coming out of the Palace with him, he with a dazed and bemused face, and she with a look of brazen courage and almost defiance.

Everything, of course, now hinges on tomorrow’s vote. Again, that is different from 1998. There was no vote of confidence then. But imagine if there was one, imagine if Alfred Sant had defied Mintoff to go ahead and bring the government down, would Dom have done that? I doubt if even fiery Dom would have done that, given the build-up there normally is before a vote of confidence.

Imagine the government somehow surviving tomorrow’s vote: where would that leave it? It would still be at the mercy of Franco Debono. Turn it as much as one would, the upshot is that the government is at the end of its real (as opposed to formal) lifetime. There is simply no time to complete all that is being prepared. Hopefully, the preparations for the election are well in hand.

The longer it gets, the more Franco Debono can find other targets to tease and bring down, or be helped by the Opposition to identify other targets, as is already being done. And the Nationalist vote is now well and truly cooked to a fine degree.

On the one hand, there should be prudence but on the other it may be the right time to strike. Whether the government should let Franco Debono determine its decision, in that his vote may determine the fate of the government, is the last point to be considered.

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