Martin Scicluna, in his column in The Times, yesterday attempted to justify the dissonance between his pre-electoral advice to his readers to vote Labour, and his dismay a couple of weeks back at the way the rule of law has deteriorated so badly over the last 18 months, by insulting those who emailed him to point out that he's the one who voted to put those people in power in the first place.

One of his interlocutors, he wrote, is "not very bright". I imagine we are to conclude from this that it is the young man's lack of brightness which renders him unable to see the wisdom of Mr Scicluna's self-serving arguments, and that Mr Scicluna is bright enough to deduce lack of brightness in others by assessing their words and actions, something that he failed to do, spectacularly, with the objects of his admiration in the Labour Party.

If you read Mr Scicluna's column carefully, you will notice that what he is really saying there is that he didn't see it coming, and that he is not to blame for this because, going by the evidence available to him before the general election, Labour was the better party to govern. We can conclude from this that he now thinks he was tricked or fooled, that he knows he misinterpreted the facts or missed many of them, or that he believes circumstances have changed mysteriously and unaccountably to cause Labour politicians who were fit for purpose in March 2013 to suddenly become unfit for purpose a few weeks later. I would say that the last option is the one Mr Scicluna favours, because it exculpates him entirely and allows him to get away feeling his judgement was at no point impaired. But then self-doubt is one of the hallmarks of real intelligence.

Referring to one woman who emailed him to say that if he is dismayed at what is happening, he should know that it is what he voted for, he wrote: "So there you have it. She made a value judgement - with which many would disagree - but felt that her historic prejudices justified her in casting her vote one way but not the other: the cry of bigots through the ages. On such ill-informed prejudices are elections won or lost. But for those who seek to think things through objectively and in a non-partisan way, some people have only disdain."

The first mistake Mr Scicluna makes here- in fact, the very mistake he made two years ago - is to think that an objective assessment of a situation is made by looking only at the facts and information which immediately present themselves, rather than framing and assessing those facts and information in context, including the historical context. The second mistake he makes, and this is linked directly to the first, is to forget that a political party is not a thing in itself but an abstraction which is, in reality, nothing more than a group of individuals with a common purpose. So it is not the party which must be assessed, as an abstraction made up of policies, campaigns and marketing collateral, but those very individuals.

Why did Martin Scicluna reach the conclusion that men who sat in government alongside Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, when Malta was a miserable economic mess, a cesspit of corruption and a human rights violator's paradise, would now - almost three decades later - make for a good government? It's because he wasn't looking at it that way, which is the very way he should have been.

Why did he think that the man who so ferociously led the campaign to keep Malta out of the European Union, because it suited his own personal career objectives, but then immediately jumped onto the bandwagon and became a member of the European Parliament, also because it suited his personal career objectives, would make an excellent prime minister? Ditto - Mr Scicluna wasn't looking at it that way. He did not consider Joseph Muscat in context. He did not do the most basic thing we should all do (but often don't) when entering into any sort of relationship with somebody or choosing them for a job: look at their track record, study their personality, and assess all the information we can gather, from the past as well as the present, to see what all this tells us about them. Why are a detailed curriculum vitae, background research and at least two interviews standard requirements before selecting somebody for a responsible job? It's because to assess a person's suitability for the post, you need the context of their past as well as their present.

When a woman refuses a date with or an offer of marriage from a man who has cheated on most if not all his previous girlfriends and/or spouses, she is not making a value judgement based on ill-informed prejudice and bigotry, as Mr Scicluna might put it. She is making a very sensible and accurate assessment based on the man's track record and his major personality flaws: that if he has done it to those other women, the likelihood is that he will do it to her - and this quite apart from the fact that the track record shows he is not the nicest and most reliable of persons, so even if he does not cheat sexually, he might well cheat in other ways, like financially.

Of course, there will be many women who think that the other women were all liars, that they provoked the man into going astray, that it was all their fault, that much of what is said about him is falsehood, and that - this is the clincher - he may at a push really have done what he did, but now he is a very different man and he loves her but never really loved the others, and she is The One Who Has Changed Him and he will never do it to her, that this time it's different. Martin Scicluna would be one of those women in the political context. Malta and the world are full of women who are genuinely astounded when they are dumped by the very men who dumped their wives for them. Mr Scicluna now has a rough idea of what their bewilderment feels like, and he's looking just as silly - though clearly not feeling one bit of it.