I write with trepidation as, with every hour that passes, the political scenery changes voluminously and I fear that by the time this article appears there is a chance that the scenery will have changed once more, but one has to work with the material one has at present.

One aspect that has clearly come out in the recent weeks is the profound crises of leadership and values that we see in the current governmental political leadership, values being principles or standards of behaviour.

The PL has always had a problem separating the concept of power partition in government, between the Executive, Parliament and the Courts, to say nothing of the Civil Service. It has also always had problems separating the party from the government, and one crisis brought about by Joseph Muscat is that he has confused the lines between party, Executive, Civil service, Courts and Parliament to the point that having all the variables in his direct control, he has blurred the differences between them and blunted the separation of powers considered normal in a living democracy.

The fact that he has paid his back-benchers (and only his back-benchers) extra remuneration from the public purse means that he has bought their silence at our expense. This is just not on, and we can now see the manifest danger of this to our democracy, as MPs put their own personal income concerns before the common good.

There is the fact that Joseph Muscat is refusing to resign as Prime Minister when his former personal Chief of Staff is implicated in both corrupt financial and other practices and is also being investigated as an accessory to murder.

There is the fact that one of his ex-chief Ministers, Konrad Mizzi, was implicated in financial graft and offshore accounts with regard to the new power station and that the businessman Yorgen Fenech, who was on the board that won the tender, is implicated in corruption and is now even a person of interest in murder.

And the fact that his Deputy Party Leader and ex-Minister Chris Cardona is also a person of interest in the on-going investigations is sufficient political reason for him to resign and clear out his whole Cabinet. In view of the fact that he had been warned about all this from when the Panama Papers story came to light through to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and that he persisted in defending them through it all, means that he is directly politically responsible for defending them for so long and that he should resign along with them, as he was wrong to do so.

Another reason why he should resign is that now he has lost all credibility and that once this has gone, it does not bode well. He should also not be allowed to represent our country at foreign meetings, especially EU meetings. The fact that Muscat pretends to persist in being correct in sticking to his PM post speaks volumes about what is wrong with the man! He lacks the right values needed for the job – the right values being the virtues that depend much on the cultivation of character.

Persisting in error is a character defect open to vicious habitual behaviour. Virtuous behaviour is character-related behaviour that leads to good decisions. Habitually character-deficient behaviour versed in making wrong – even bad – decisions is called a habitual character versed in vice.  

In simple terms, Muscat has been manifestly wrong several times on this issue; the people involved are people very close to his administration and, if he has any ounce of self-respect, he should accept political responsibility and leave quietly. He has broken every cardinal virtue: the virtue of prudence (rationality), of justice, of fortitude (for good) and of temperance (for good).

If Muscat does not resign, it is incumbent upon the nation to see that he does! In a democracy, it is simply not acceptable that he remains as our Prime Minister and if he has any self-respect, he should leave. He has fallen far short of the responsibilities that the spirit of our Constitution demands of the person occupying the position.

Aristotle speaks of the nurturing of character-related and intellectual virtues to build a good personality and, in my opinion Muscat has not habitually nurtured them. The fact he is hedging in trying to buy time and trying to defend his government hoping to get away with it, speaks volumes.

I cannot help noting that all this trouble has stemmed from a government that had some good policies in its programme but policies that were, unfortunately, allowed to be overtaken by avarice for money. Someone important and famous once said that the love of money is the root of all evil.

I recently watched an interesting film called Cassandra’s Dream (Ewan McGregor) in which two brothers pursue the love of money to the point where they commit murder, only to lose everything in the end. Little did I know that – two weeks later – the same would happen to the Labour Government here in Malta. The pursuance of money, to the point where it becomes all encompassing, corrupt and disproportionate to need, displacing good values and government, displacing solidarity and displacing rationality, is when evil raises its head and we lose everything: evil to the point of committing murder.

The avarice of the political personalities involved has ruined everything for the Labour Party and for Malta and, in the eyes of the international community, we now have to lower our eyes and start again. And this is all in the name of avarice which, in itself, is a habitual vice.

In last Sunday’s homily on the Feast of Christ the King, Archbishop Charles Scicluna hit the nail on the head when he warned that when the values of justice, solidarity and truth, and the values of God,  are replaced by the love of money, then we see happening what is now happening around us. They say that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and this applies to power just as much as it applies to other things when we misuse them.

The behaviour of this government under Joseph Muscat, from its very beginning, squandered the good it did on the malicious corrupt abuse of power and money with the result that the inevitable is happening and power is being revoked even in the minds of the people who enabled it.

Hopefully, the new Prime Minister – whoever he or she may be, will have the intellectual and character-related virtues necessary to lead the whole population back to peace of mind, to good living and to peace and progress in the real sense of truly sustainable development, even where virtues and ethics are concerned.