Two and a half years into the Tagħna Lkoll game of power, cronyism, corruption and sleaze, Marlene Farrugia has done the inevitable and resigned the party whip.

The fact that the party whip also happens to be her life companion serves to make things more complicated - for Joseph Muscat. She has resigned the party whip but she lives with the party whip.

At this point I would say that Godfrey Farrugia - incidentally, the two are not married; Farrugia is her maiden name to which she reverted after her years as Marlene Pullicino - has no choice but to resign from his position as whip. Unless he does so, he will create undue awkwardness for his party and for himself. Before long, I think he may find that he will also have to resign from the party itself. Though this is not such an immediately pressing issue as relinquishing his position as whip, Godfrey Farrugia will find before long that his situation as a Labour backbencher is untenable when he shares his home with another member of parliament who does not now belong to the Labour Party. His party leader will not trust him and the other members of his parliamentary group will not trust him either. Lack of trust will not be based on any wrong-doing on his part, but for the obvious reason that a man cannot be requested or expected to hide things from the woman with whom he shares his life and his home. Whether he wishes to do so of his own volition is one thing - and I don't think that's the case here - but his party cannot ask him to do so. They can't discuss things and then tell him "Now make sure you don't tell Marlene." They will simply not discuss things with him present.

In truth, Godfrey Farrugia does not belong with the Labour Party either. He was a lifelong Nationalist Party supporter and as I recall, had even been asked to contest a general election in the 1990s on the Nationalist Party ticket (he didn't). Marlene Farrugia had also supported the Nationalist Party for many years - though in her case she grew up in a Labour-voting family, unlike Godfrey - and she even stood for local council elections on the PN ticket in 1996 and was elected. The two of them moved away from the Nationalist Party and towards the Labour Party over the last few years. I might be very wrong about this, but it looks to me as though the biggest factor driving them away from the Nationalist Party was Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, her estranged husband, and the manner in which he was championed by the Nationalists as the coming man, before the truth about his nature and business activities burst through in the events surrounding the 2008 general election and its aftermath.

What the general public has discovered about Pullicino Orlando's personality traits since then is something Marlene Farrugia must have known for a very long time before that. It must have been very upsetting to her to see the Nationalist Party pay him so much heed while being unable to see through him. Her position as a Nationalist Party politician - for let's not forget that this is what Marlene Farrugia was back then - would have been emotionally untenable in that scenario as her marriage to Pullicino Orlando broke down and the situation between them deteriorated to the point where they no longer spoke to each other (they still don't). As somebody raised in a Laboursupporting family, she would have had no mental block about moving back to Labour, given her interest in politics and her reluctance to give it up - only to find out that the reasons she stopped voting for the Labour Party as an adult were still there all along, after all, manifesting themselves fully only after the party's return to government.

The fact remains that the prime minister is closer to, and is more deeply enmeshed with, Marlene Farrugia's ex-husband than he is to and with Marlene Farrugia herself or her companion Godfrey Farrugia, even though the latter is his party whip and Pullicino Orlando is not a Labour politician but only a Labour activist. Joseph Muscat has no problem with upsetting, even very deeply, Marlene Farrugia and Godfrey Farrugia. But he dare not risk upsetting Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando because he knows too much about the unsavoury goings-on before the general election. As has been amply demonstrated, Pullicino Orlando's reaction to being thwarted is to go on the rampage, seeking vengeance, stopping at nothing and refusing to let go. Muscat does not want to have to deal with that.

So the bottom line here is that Muscat has lost Marlene Farrugia, will almost certainly lose Godfrey Farrugia, and will get to keep Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. I have four words of advice for him on this score: good luck with that.