The longer the Nationalist Party’s political crisis drags on, the more it resembles an instrument of torture. Like the mediaeval rack, every turn of the crisis tears the Nationalist Party further apart. One minister has been forced out of office. Malta’s Permanent Representative to the European Union has had to resign.

But the collateral damage has not stopped there. Three Nationalist Members of Parliament have been forbidden from contesting the next election under the party label. Last week one MP left the party and declared that he would sit as an “Independent”. Another has gone away, disgruntled, to lick his wounds and to consider his position. Another MP has shrugged his shoulders and sloped off for the summer holidays.

One Nationalist Party limb in Parliament has been ripped off. How long will the other two hold? If nothing else, the developments of the last few months have underlined the urgent need for electoral reform to end the stranglehold of single seat majorities. It has also shown the Prime Minister’s admirable resilience in the face of mayhem and intense pressure.

Not since the post-war politics of the last century has a party in Malta been riven by factional strife so publicly. The talk of “oligarchies” and cliques which controlled everything, and the involvement of Malta’s current EU Commissioner, clearly still hurt at the way the party had treated him, have added to the picture of disunity, skulduggery and mistrust.

It is inevitable that in view of the form of democratic politics practised here, modelled as it is on Westminster, that single-party governments contain different views and interests. The Opposition, and in Malta to a lesser extent, a relatively supine media spend much of their time trying to expose these differences. The Leader of the Opposition has had a field day in the last nine months as fissures, internal divisions and differences in the Nationalist governing party have opened up, unbidden, before him. This is the nature of democratic party politics. To those who cry “treachery” at the three recalcitrant MPs, I would simply remind them that in 1998 Mintoff’s “treachery” was the Nationalists’ “triumph”.

I had not appreciated, until I had the pleasure of getting to know well the late, much lamented Fr Peter Serracino Inglott – a Nationalist Party guru – in the last four years of his life, to what extent the party was a coalition of different wings and interests, and always had been. In the past, internal party discipline was able to hold its Members of Parliament together.

As we look back over the last four years, it would be interesting to conjecture how big a part the much-vaunted “small” Cabinet which Prime Minister Gonzi assembled in 2008 has played in the Nationalist Party’s implosion. There can be little doubt that the crass decisions made by the Cabinet over, for example, ministerial pay and divorce, and the high-handed manner in which the introduction of the water and electricity rates was handled, played a pivotal role in the government’s unpopularity.

But I am also convinced that the thwarted ambitions, bruised egos and dissatisfaction of those MPs who expected but failed to get ministerial promotion have also played an important part. This is perhaps a lesson for the future. A Prime Minister can keep unruly MPs under better control if he can exercise greater largesse through the distribution of junior ministerial posts. Making everybody a “Parliamentary Assistant” simply didn’t work.

What happens next? The Nationalist Party is trailing in the polls. But Parliament does not return from the summer recess until October. Saving a national or international crisis, therefore, the government does not have to test its relative majority – the newly declared “Independent” MP has agreed to support it – for some weeks yet. It hopes to use the breathing space to re-group as best it can and to prepare to fight an election, probably in the autumn.

It hopes to persuade the country that it should be re-elected. Austin Gatt has forecast that the Nationalist Party will win the next election and that, despite an almost unbroken period of 25 years in government, will stay in power for another 20. Coming from the minister who has probably been one of the chief architects of the government’s present travails, this may sound a bit rich. But stranger things have happened in politics.

The strongest argument in favour of Labour winning the next election, whenever it happens, is the need for change. It is unhealthy in a democracy for the same party to stay in power for too long. There is a need, so the argument goes, for the injection of new policies, for new faces at the helm, above all for a party that has become arrogant with power to be taken down a peg or two.

And yet. And yet. While there can be little doubt that the government is tired and disunited, its factionalism rife and there needs to be a clean sweep of almost all its ministers, the case for change is not wholly persuasive. While the government seems to have a death wish about it, the opposition Labour Party has not yet convinced the country that it is ready for government.

While I subscribe, therefore, to the view that the country needs a change – if only to remove the self-satisfied smirks from the faces of some ministers and party apparatchiks and hangers-on who are well past their sell-by date – I cannot sign up to the notion of change for change’s sake. The current Labour Party lacks substance. It may be lurking there, but we have not seen it yet. It does not appear to have a coherent plan for dealing with the massive challenges that lie ahead for Malta. The more it makes uncosted promises, the less credible the alternative government looks.

Joseph Muscat must show that the (Progressive) Labour Party has changed. It carries a great deal of nasty historic baggage. Before Tony Blair came to power, he realised that if the British public was to support him he needed to show that the (New) Labour Party was different. This included ditching its antipathy to Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, a distancing from its trade unions paymasters and the abolition of “Clause 4” in its Constitution.

In Joseph Muscat’s case, he has to show that the “old faces” that tarnished Labour’s image in the 1980s will have no place in any future government, that like Alfred Sant he will govern in the interests of the country as a whole, not sectoral interests within it, and that he will be genuinely seeking the best human talent available regardless of political affiliation.

With Parliament in recess for the next two months, politics has entered a period of phoney war. This is the calm before the storm. The storm could be precipitated early by another eurozone crisis (Greece or Spain or Italy), or later by the calling of a general election. But whenever politics resume, let us at least make an attempt to consider the very serious issues that confront this country without the poisonous, personal vituperation that seems to characterise the Maltese way of doing politics.