Let us try to analyze the Robert Abela structure of power. It is not the parliamentary group, nor the upper reaches of the party.
It is a largely unstructured core, brought together and kept alive by the man who created it, Abela. Such is its fragility, from bottom to the top.
Even the person who was the deputy leader, Chris Fearne, was not part of the inner core.
Meanwhile Abela went on his boat to Sicily practically every weekend and presumably kept in touch through his mobile.
The people chosen by Abela undoubtedly tried their best but sometimes could not keep up with their leader's maverick brain and there were some cases where what was white one day became black the next day. You had to be alert and skip the rope at the right time.
Inevitably too, not all who were chosen kept their post and we have had quite a cluster of sacked officials.
But they were all handsomely remunerated, some earning even more than Abela himself.
In time, some more than others, came to be symbols of all that's going wrong in this administration.
Take the Film Commissioner Johann Grech. I hold myself partially responsible. When he was proposed by the Labour Party as an opinion writer many years ago I closed an eye on his atrocious English and on his being a scion of Labour's foremost clerical family in Gozo and thus gave him a springboard which has enabled him to become the Film Commissioner, renowned for his lavish expenditure more than on the results attained.
To justify all this he has now given us a sort of justification on the lines of the articles he used to write without people telling him he is very wrong.
Robert Abela looks on complacently and approves. He would, too, because as he showed us in his New Year message, he shares the same fatal flaws, he is blind to what is wrong in what he did and actually thinks people owe him congratulations.
He has found an Attorney General ready to do even what he did not have to tell her what to do in so many words.
He has turned PBS into a One TV 2 which buries the story how it has been fined thousands by the Broadcasting Authority in an incomprehensible and incomplete snippet at the very end of the news bulletin on Christmas Eve.
Now he has targeted the immigrants, blaming them for all that's going wrong.
In this he is imitating what other politicians are doing but there's a huge difference between what Abela is proposing, for instance, and Trump's much more humane one. As we will see in the coming weeks.
Cities of light
The streets are well lit, all the trees are wrapped in lights, the shops are open and people flock in, adults and children, all wrapped up against the cold.
London? Paris? New York? No. It's Beirut last Christmas Eve. In our minds Beirut is in ruins, another Gaza. But the YouTube video anyone can see shows a very different Beirut, still affluent as it was before being invaded, before the huge explosion in the port, before the collapse of its currency.
Those who have remained battle on. I venture to say there were more festive lights in Beirut than in Sliema for example. See the video yourselves.
And there are even more videos published under the collective title "They did not want you to see".
A truly enchanting scene made even more attractive by the falling snow.
The houses, the shops, the facades of the buildings and the decorations combine to make an enchanting scene.
Not London, not Rome, not Paris. It's Moscow, rendered out of our reach by the war and the sanctions. And yet it's there, with all its enchantment.
And then there's another unlikely candidate - Baghdad. See for yourselves - gardens with trees lit up, tableux , children and families enjoying themselves. And we have so many gardens in Floriana and Valletta all silent and dark.
Christmas exerts its own fascination far beyond the frontier of Christianity. Even in Syria, just days after the end of the Assad dictatorship, if we are to believe yet another YouTube video they created in record time a Christmas Village complete with mulled wine.
As we take down the decorations and store them away, as we switch off the lights we would do well to reflect on this Middle Eastern story of a humble family which has proved once again to be more resilient than emperors, armies and great leaders.
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