The Opposition leader’s decision to vote in favour of spring hunting is disastrous for the Nationalist Party. The tragedy is that this decision has probably been considered only in terms of what it means for the referendum and not in terms of what it means for the Nationalist Party itself.

The issue is multi-faceted but I’ll try to knock through a couple of the main issues in 800 words or thereabouts. First, there’s branding. Joseph Muscat’s stance in favour of spring hunting is entirely consistent with his post-electoral brand. The pre-electoral brand has been ditched because it achieved the aim of getting him into government. Now he needs another brand to keep him there. Muscat has alienated and betrayed the truly liberal - as distinct from the single-issue focussed who are not necessarily liberal - because he cannot square their wishes and demands with those of developers and hunters, on whom he is far more heavily dependent. His post-electoral brand is closer to the truth: needs must when the devil drives, and money comes first. This has made a key tranche of his new supporters really quite tetchy.

There is a discernible group of people – my sort of people, for want of a better description – who have repeatedly put the Nationalist Party in power but who began deserting it in 2008 and who, in 2013, formed a mass stampede towards the Labour Party. Without these people, the Nationalist Party is not electable. I have said for years that they are the ones who put the Nationalist Party in power at their leisure and pleasure but they are the most easily alienated from that party because they are fundamentally uncomfortable with its feel and its brand. It just happened to be more liberal than Labour. But then when Labour began to look and feel more liberal than the Nationalist Party, the inevitable happened.

Getting them back will be difficult because if there is one thing that people like these detest, it’s admitting error, even to themselves. They will do the limbo under a row of poisoned spikes before they admit that their judgement was impaired not so much in not wanting to vote for the Nationalist Party (I can see why they wouldn’t have wanted to do that) but in seeing Muscat as a real liberal and his party as a terrific outfit, rather than as a bandwagon of opportunism cobbled together from special-interest groups in head-on conflict with each other and led by money-and-power-hungry individuals.

But at the same time, they are discernibly uncomfortable with the situation and the best indicator of that is they’ve stopped boasting about their support for Labour and aren’t even talking about political issues at all. Where their Facebook pages were littered with political arguments two years ago, there is now a parade of inane memes and Hallmark sentiments.

They will shift again not if Muscat continues to make them uncomfortable with his behaviour, choices and decisions. That would be an admission of error to themselves and others. No, they will shift if they can tell themselves (and others) that they are doing so because the Nationalist Party is now more in line with their way of thinking than the Labour Party is. Labour and Muscat are beginning to be more than a little embarrassing, so the Nationalist Party should have slipped smoothly into that breach. The first really big opportunity has presented itself – a stance against spring hunting – and the Nationalist Party has blown it.

The people of whom I speak belong to the particular demographic most inclined to have a firm opinion about spring hunting, and they are against it. Where others are unbothered, not sure what to think, or in favour of spring hunting, this lot are predominantly against it. And they are the ones whose votes the Nationalist Party most needs.

But the political parties haven’t taken a stance, I hear you say; only their leaders have done that. Well, hardly. The party leader represents the party. His views are emblematic of what the party stands for even if the party itself has taken no stance and even if key members of its hierarchy vote differently. Also, a vote for a party in a general election is a vote to make that party’s leader prime minister, so their ‘personal’ choices are clocked, noted and given due prominence.

More than 40,000 people signed the petition for a referendum. Hundreds of volunteers worked for weeks to collect those signatures, going round bars, shops and offices – ordinary people who had never done anything so forward in their lives. The Coalition Against Spring Hunting battled with the organisational aspect, the procedural problems and the obstacles put up by the hunters’ lobby, culminating in the Constitutional Court case. And instead of standing by them, the Opposition leader rejects their efforts outright and says that he will vote with the hunters. Because, apparently, 45,000 people can be wrong even if 36,000 can’t be. The Nationalist Party seems not to have understood that all those people would see Busuttil’s decision as a slap in the face, and who can blame them. As a result, they will view him unfavourably. That they also view Muscat unfavourably is neither here nor there.

My last point is about honesty. Simon Busuttil strikes nobody as a man who is in favour of spring hunting. People who are against spring hunting understand at some kind of instinctive level that he is one of their kind (hence the tragedy of this decision). They are now busy reaching the conclusion that he is not voting Yes because he believes in it, but because it is convenient, and that therefore his vote is dishonest and an abuse of a democratic tool. They expect this of Joseph Muscat; they do not expect it of Busuttil. It is extremely damaging to his image, to his brand. That Busuttil has said he is voting in favour of the derogation rather than of spring hunting is an awkward piece of sophistry. This referendum is for and against spring hunting, and let’s make no bones about it.