With their vote last night in favour of Konrad Mizzi, all those Labour MPs, including his cabinet colleagues, who have been critical of his behaviour have now painted themselves into a tight corner which they shall be forced to share with him until 2018. There can be no more posturing on Facebook, no more cryptic comments to the press, no more “in his position I would have resigned”. The point they should have made there, anyway, is that they would never have been in his position in the first place. Isn’t that what this is all about? That Konrad Mizzi shouldn’t have set up a secret operation carefully crafted for money-laundering, and not that he should have resigned for doing so. Hearing the Labour whip, Godfrey Farrugia, repeat that same old canard that he would have resigned in Mizzi’s situation really made me raise my eyebrows because it made so little sense to talk about how a man with manifestly no integrity should behave with integrity when he is discovered to have no integrity.

They are all done for now. By obliging them to vote with the whip – and by getting the whip himself, who he had sacked from the cabinet and humiliated, to dance at his whim like a trained poodle with no self-respect -  Joseph Muscat has forced every last one of them, including the dissenters, onto his side of the fence on the matter of his corrupt henchman. He may not have put an end to criticism in the country – rather the opposite, because it will only get worse now – but he has put an end to public criticism by those on his side of the House. They’ll now have to talk about something else on their Facebook Timelines, and something tells me that the Education Minister’s fascination with the Malta Financial Services Authority chairman is only going to get worse as a result of the internalised embarrassment he feels at having voted to protect Mizzi. Now he’s going to really lash out, projecting the anger he feels about Mizzi onto Joe Bannister and using Bannister as his usual snake-in-the-grass indirect way of getting at someone, in this case Muscat.

Muscat may feel empowered now, that he has flex his parliamentary majority muscle and won, but how wrong he is. The worst thing that could have happened to him tonight – yes, far worse than the success of the motion to remove Mizzi – is a show of strength of the matter of corruption and a corrupt minister. It makes them all look corrupt. It makes the government as a whole look as though they have closed ranks around corruption, putting up their shields in Roman ‘tortoise’ formation to protect Konrad Mizzi and allow him to carry on whatever it is he is doing with Keith Schembri, Brian Tonna and – this seems obvious to me – the Prime Minister himself. Now they are all branded as complicit in whatever it is those four are up to, even though they are locked out of it.

I think the Labour whip has problems now that are more serious than those of his colleagues. Tonight he went head to head with the woman he lives with, and it was not a pretty sight. It was, in the true sense of the word, tragic to see a man brought so low by his poor choices, his decision to stand with the corrupt who are, when it comes down to brass tacks, strangers to him, rather than to take decisive action, resign, and stand with the woman who – and this is indisputable – put him completely to shame last night.

It was actually embarrassing to watch Godfrey Farrugia demean himself in parliament, before a large television audience, by speaking of Konrad Mizzi’s “martyrdom” and how it is so important to be “good and compassionate” towards him, that “goodness matters more than justice”. Well, in that case, why don’t we do away completely with the Courts of Justice and turn the Corradino Prisons over to the Malta Developers Association and Sandro Chetcuti? The Prime Minister spoke last night of something he called the “mow-rill highground”. I don’t think he has quite realised that he has lost that for good, and so have the lot of them. Last night’s vote did not strengthen Muscat and his men. It delivered what I think will be eventually be seen as the fatal blow, self-inflicted – another turning-point and the beginning of the end.

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