I don’t suppose Michelle will be buying a reproduction of one of those British World War II posters for Joseph to stick on his office wall at the Mile End headquarters of the Moviment Bla Isem

Let’s face it, if her husband hadn’t blabbed uncontrollably to Simon Busuttil, when they were both MEPs on a flight to Brussels in February 2008, he wouldn’t have become Leader of the Opposition and she wouldn’t be about to become Mrs Prime Minister.

Joseph Muscat’s personal success has been built directly on the abject failure of the Labour Party’s common goal. Without that failure, he would still be a Super One reporter or an employee at Alfred Mifsud’s financial services company. Because Labour’s campaign against EU membership failed, Muscat became a member of the European Parliament. Because Labour failed at the last general election, Joseph Muscat became Leader of the Opposition, even though he did not have a seat in the house, electors did not vote him into parliament, and he had to be co-opted like Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici (iż-Żero) before him.

On the basis of the votes which the Nationalist Party haemorrhaged when news of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s lucrative and anti-environmental Mistra deal broke in the last couple of days of the 2008 electoral campaign, it is appropriate to conclude that, had the news been broken earlier by Labour, and had the Nationalist Party not been prepared for it thanks to Muscat’s loose tongue when in conversation with Busuttil on that flight, Alfred Sant might well have become Prime Minister. The major stumbling-block which the Nationalist Party faced at that stage was that, even though Simon Busuttil correctly identified Pullicino Orlando as the target during his conversation with Muscat, Pullicino Orlando repeatedly denied that he had a contract.

Last week’s release of the transcript of a telephone conversation between Gordon Pisani, who worked on the 2008 campaign, and Pullicino Orlando, made public and beyond dispute, the fact that the Nationalist Party only discovered the existence of the contract when Sant produced it on state television on the last day of the campaign. And still Pullicino Orlando tried to get out of it by pretending he felt ill, then turning up to party HQ without the contract but with his lawyer.

I am glad that Simon Busuttil has made public the fact that he was the one to whom Joseph Muscat spoke. This has put paid to the rumours that the Nationalist Party was inventing stuff when it said that Muscat gave the game away. References to an anonymous “PN official” didn’t help much, either. Busuttil has a great deal of credibility. He is well respected and taken seriously. Nobody, not even Joseph Muscat, can accuse him of maliciously concocting things about him and get away with that accusation. People are going to believe Busuttil and not Muscat.

Driving to lunch yesterday, I tuned in to Super One radio and found one of the Moviment Bla Isem’s two deputy leaders ranting away. It wasn’t Inspector Gadget, but the other one, who notoriously made a sexual pass at a rubber puppet on a Super One television show a couple of years back (you’ll find the video clip on YouTube).

Toni Abela was in full flood, telling us how very immoral the Nationalist Party is, how you can’t trust anyone these days, and how nobody seems to have principles anymore. Amazing, right? But there was more. He was particularly shocked and traumatised – what is the world coming to? – by Gordon Pisani’s release of that telephone conversation transcript. Oh dear, who can you trust nowadays, this is terrible, what low standards, how disgraceful, blah blah blah.

You will understand that what Abela found so dreadful was not Pullicino Orlando’s behaviour in that telephone conversation (and what it signified), but that Pisani finally released the facts about it after four years of discretion, when he was finally provoked to do so by Pullicino Orlando’s strange decision to call for Richard Cachia Caruana’s expulsion from the Nationalist Party, citing Pisani as one of his witnesses, to bolster his case. Well, that didn’t quite turn out as he planned, but never mind.

But back to Abela, and his great shock at the crumbling morals of political society: you wouldn’t imagine that he is the deputy leader of a political party (or movement) which only last week released an actual voice recording, taken illicitly, of a really private moment, from years ago, in its arch political enemy’s life. That recording was a huge invasion of privacy and had no public interest value. This is quite unlike the telephone conversation between Gordon Pisani and Pullicino Orlando, which is of proper public interest and had to be said.

But then it’s a matter of Toni Abela wearing far too many hats at the same time: Malta Today’s lawyer, deputy leader of the Labour Party, which worked with Pullicino Orlando on ousting Cachia Caruana...no wonder he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. But then it’s probably a good thing, for his sanity and peace of mind, that his own morality and principles seem to be so very accommodating.