The Prime Minister's wife is making a big mistake by flashing herself around and having the government's Department of Information issue press photographs of her meeting this or that star or dignitary on jollies paid for by the taxpayer, with an accompanying press release detailing everything she is wearing.

TVM recently went to the extent of telling viewers that one of the frocks Mrs Muscat wore on a jaunt overseas was "vintage orange". Do we care? This might be because in the absence of a Hello edition published in and for Malta, the state broadcaster has moved in to close the gap - but of course, only where the Prime Minister's wife, a woman consummately lacking in natural glamour and magnetism, is concerned. The public is not fascinated by Michelle Muscat and does not really want to know what she wore and where she went, unless it is to discover how much public money she is wasting. Therefore, the government's Department of Information and the state broadcaster have been corralled into trying to manufacture some public fascination with her. A comparison with the way official state media in totalitarian states promote the 'charity work' and profile of the dictator's wife would be unfortunate but also close to home.

Let's leave aside the fact that the spouse of the prime minister has absolutely no role under the Maltese Constitution and so her claim to public funds and public attention is very tenuous. The real reason she shouldn't be doing all this is because, after the initial thrill that Labour voters felt at the novelty of having a leader with a real, live wife at his side, a palpable level of irritation has begun to set in. The first clue is the jokes made at her expense even by those who voted for her husband last year and who voted for his party again last May. After the jokes comes bitter sarcasm, and after the sarcasm comes real anger. That is the natural progression in these matters.

Mrs Muscat seems not to understand the difference between forcing herself on the public via the media and the public forcing itself on her via the same route. When spouses of presidents, prime ministers and royals are featured in the press, it is not because their husband's official office has been instructed to release carefully crafted photographs of them accompanied by press releases detailing where they have been, who they have met, and what they wore while doing so. It is because the press chases those women of its own accord, and this only in response to public demand. That public demand cannot be manufactured by the women themselves.

The American press goes after Michelle Obama for pictures and details of what she wears because members of the American public want that. The British press chases the Duchess of Cambridge and to a much lesser extent Samantha Cameron in response to curiosity by the British public (and in the case of the Duchess of Cambridge, the rest of the world too). But in Malta, nobody gives a damn what Mrs Muscat wears and this is a glorified village where we see her in the street and round the shops anyway, so no journalists are chasing her for details about her "vintage orange" dress because the last time we saw her dropping off the children at school with her chauffeur, only the hair-rollers were missing. In that absence of interest by the public, Mrs Muscat does wrong to foist herself on us anyway by means of government Department of Information press releases and photographs. If we in the press wanted to know what she wore when she went to New York, we would ring her and ask her ourselves. But we don't.

There's more to it than that. Many have made the comparison to Maria Eva Duarte de Peron, in the sense that this is what Mrs Muscat is trying to do with her public image. But Malta in 2014 is not post-war Argentina. The reasons why Juan Peron's wife reached the status of popular sainthood in the eyes of Argentina's descamisados (literally, shirtless ones), when she was that country's First Lady in the late 1940s, are too complex to go into in a newspaper column. But fundamentally, what you were looking at there was a situation in which a great mass of seriously impoverished people, living in an undemocratic state, oppressed by a real system of oligarchy as an entrenched feudal fact of life, the social order fossilised for centuries, saw one of their own reach the highest pinnacle of luxury, riches and power through marriage and conniving. And in her, they saw themselves. But the crucial thing is that they knew her situation was a one-off, that it was an exception and not a universal possibility open to them all. It was a particular set of circumstances, and not democracy and social mobility, which put her there.

When Mrs Peron spent public money in the millions on Chanel suits and evening-gowns, on pearls, diamonds and emeralds, on hats and coats and ocean travel, the descamisados of Argentina applauded and admired her. She was doing it for them. In her, they saw the triumph of their oppressed class. The more she spent, the more impressed and admiring they were. She knew this, and used it to justify her colossal profligacy and her flaunting of privilege. She wore a Chanel suit and diamonds, paid for by the poor, to stand on a balcony and throw pennies at them. And they cheered and wept with pleasure.

The situation in Malta is entirely different. There are no descamisados here, and despite the Law Commissioner's best efforts at persuading us to the contrary, there is and was no oligarchy. But there are very many people who Mrs Muscat purports to represent in terms of social background. The difference is that Malta, unlike 1940s Argentina, is a democracy and those people (plus many others besides) voted to put her husband in power. He did not stage a military coup. Another difference is that in Malta, unlike 1940s Argentina, there is plenty of social mobility and there has been for centuries. The net result is that when such people see Mrs Muscat flashing herself around and eating up public money on ego-boosting, thrill-seeking trips to meet famous people and be photographed with them for her album of mementoes, they do not get excited on her behalf. They get annoyed.

Rather than seeing Mrs Muscat as representing them, as the oppressed Argentines saw Mrs Peron, they look at her and think that she's no better than they are and what gives her the right to put on such airs and graces and behave as though she's on a 10-year joyride, milking it for all it is worth. From there, it is but one step to working out that they put her there. The next thing is that they feel their vote was cajoled out of them so that some woman could have a good time and spend public money doing it, even to the extent of taking her children out of school to join her on the trips while the Education Minister is threatening everybody else about the consequences of doing the same with their own children.

Then the step after that is the inevitable, if she pushes the envelope too far: "I'll show you how to have a good time. I put you there and I'll bring you down again." You see, Argentina had a rigid class system. It was impossible for a descamisado to be anything but, no matter how long he lived or hard he worked. Mrs Peron represented the phenomenal exception, so no Argentine of her deprived background looked at her and said "Hey, that could be me. Who do you think you are?" But that is exactly what they say in Malta, and not just about Michelle Muscat.

Malta's inherent contradiction is that everybody boasts, brags and shows off about what they have bought and done and where they have gone. But they boast as equals. Once one of your equals wangles himself or herself into a higher position and carries on showing off from that position - or worse, uses it for magnified boasting - the Consensual Boasting Pact has been broken and those who feel left behind or out-boasted become cross and vengeful.

It is not people like me who Mrs Muscat has to fear. It is her sort and others who are not her sort but who nevertheless voted to make her husband prime minister. At some point they are going to make the link between her jetting off accompanied by her entire family to meet this or that big cheese, wearing a vintage orange dress with a Swarovski-encrusted something or other, or a dress made of specially woven fabric emblazoned with the emblem of the Order of St John, and yet another complicated coiffure, and their vote last year. And it will begin to bother them.

Mrs Muscat obviously knows, because her husband and his party have been playing on this for years in their various campaigns that Maltese electors really do not like to feel that they have voted to give individuals a nice time and access to goods, resources and networks of influence. When they are convinced, whether they are correct or not, that this is what they have done with their own hands, they will ignore all the other more significant factors that should shape their decision (like an economy doing very well, for instance) and vote to topple those they think have been given an unfair advantage, either directly or indirectly, through the popular vote. That is how the Maltese mind works.

Mrs Muscat knows this. Yet the lure of the Walmart version of the Hello magazine lifestyle has proved overwhelming nonetheless. What she needs to do right now to safeguard her husband's image in the medium to long term is wear sackcloth and ashes and get out of sight, taking her children with her. If she were also to take up a proper job, or at least pretend to contribute to the economy rather than just leeching off it, that would help too. Surely what is good enough for the wives of Tony Blair, David Cameron and Matteo Renzi, and what was good enough for François Hollande's consort, is also good enough for Joseph Muscat's. They all work and have always done so. Or does Mrs Muscat conform to the backward Maltese maxim that wives who don't work are proof that their husband makes enough to keep them? That's not very liberal and progressive.

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