There is now, out there, a massive reaction by the Partit Laburista following the negative vote against Leo Brincat in the European Parliament.

It is, in a way, understandable, for nobody likes losing. But it has long been coming.

Giving vent to outrage, to threats too, serves little.

This national humiliation, for it is nothing less than that, could be predicted and could have been avoided.

Equally clear, it is not a vote on Mr Brincat’s personal character – the EP members anyway do not know him.

It was predicted and also avoidable because, as this paper foresaw yesterday, it looked like Mr Brincat’s candidacy was heading for the wall. He, or rather his backers, kept driving hard at the wall and the predictable happened.

Thus the Labour leadership loses two valid (to the party at any rate) veteran leaders, first Toni Abela now Leo Brincat. It uses up its heroes and throws them on the pyre of ambitions. It must think it has an infinite resource at its back, which it does not have, which no party has.

And all this was in aid of one thing only: to keep on board a minister who has disgraced himself, his government and his country by investing in a suspect jurisdiction.

Was it worth all this?

There is, of course, honour and loyalty to colleagues but not at this price. Not at the price of a national humiliation. Not when everyone could see what was coming.

It may become clearer as time goes by that Malta, or rather Malta under this administration, has little to no clout in Europe. The EP would not have come to such a result if the country involved was a bigger country. But probably that country, even if a big country, would have done its soundings before and cleared the air.

Not having done so shows extreme arrogance on the part of the Maltese government, not to say on the part of Leo Brincat himself. To go on now and move to the next and final level, the Council level, shows a supreme disregard of the EP, which does not forget such slurs easily.

Mr Brincat now makes the argument that he may have been defeated by the EP, but he was approved by the EP committee. That is nothing less than disingenuous seeing that the committee ‘majority’ consisted of former premier Alfred Sant who used a little strategy to get in among the committee.

The appeal this paper feels it must make to Prime Minister Muscat is: stop being so hardheaded, for you will get nothing if not pain from this. Let us see now if your colleagues around the Council table are so smitten by your powers as to disregard the EP. Or whether they intend to show you what they really feel about you and about Malta by their vote about Leo Brincat.

This was, we might say, the first shot across Muscat’s bows. An avviso ai naviganti. The EU and its bodies have various means of getting the recalcitrant to fall in line, even though this could get better. An EU that is getting ready to tackle bigger nations like Hungary, like Poland, when issues of substance are involved, will think nothing of sweeping aside tiny Malta if it starts to act too big for its boots.

There are other issues coming up – the Panama Papers investigation, the visa scandal and the passports one too. By antagonizing the EU institutions Malta can only bring damage upon its head.